1. Exhibition view of the exhibition "In her hands" at the Bucerius Kunst Forum - Photograph of Ulrich Perrey
Surrealism in three dimensions
Surrealism is often thought of primarily as a movement of painting and literature. Its imagery is strange, dreamlike, its language poetic and enigmatic. Yet sculpture was part of Surrealism from the very beginning. However, sculptors, especially women sculptors have long been marginalized or overlooked in its histories, scholarship, and exhibitions.
This exhibition at the Bucerius Kunst Forum brings to the forefront three remarkable women sculptors: Isabelle Waldberg, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, and Maria Martins. Their work is shown together for the first time, and each of them developed a distinctive sculptural language that drew on surrealist ideas but gave them new form.
These sculptures are not mere illustrations of dreams or decorative objects. They are complex works engaging deeply with identity, memory, myth, and power. They explore the body, community, and other cultures, especially non-European traditions and challenge what sculpture can express, particularly when created by women often excluded from dominant modern art narratives.
Isabelle Waldberg, structures of thought
2. Isabelle Waldberg, Construction, around 1945, Private Collection, © Estate of Isabelle Waldberg, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024
Born in 1911 to a family of Swiss blacksmiths, Isabelle Waldberg developed an early fascination with form and structure. As a child, she watched a timber-framed house being built in her village, a prelude to her future work of fragile assemblies of elements.
In the 1930s, in Zurich, she entered avant-garde circles and discovered Surrealism. And in 1936, she moved to Paris to study sculpture, refining her technique while embracing an experimental approach, nourished by figures like Charles Malfray and Robert Wlérick.
But it was in New York, where she fled during World War II, that her artistic language took shape. Immersed in the community of exiled surrealists, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, she encountered ritual objects from North America and Oceania. These non-European forms transformed her vision and inspired her Constructions, some of her most singular works.
Among them, Le dernier rĂ´deur (The Last Prowler, 1945), made of beechwood sticks, wire, and glue, evokes Marshall Islands navigation charts used to read currents and maritime routes. Waldberg created over 40 such works in a few years. Fragile and supple at first, now rigid, these structures seem to vibrate with inner tension, as if holding the memory of an ancient movement or language.
Back in Paris in 1946, she shifted her approach. Working with plaster, metal, and bronze, her sculptures gained new weight and volume. Le carcan (The Shackles, c.1960) embodies this shift: a dense bronze mass, archaic yet mechanical, uncompromising in its refusal of conventional beauty. “I am asked why I don’t make something beautiful,” she wrote in 1988. “I don’t know what beauty is. Is it what shines, what’s polished? And for whom exactly?”
Until her death in 1990, Isabelle Waldberg continuously questioned form, balancing rigor and mystery in a deeply personal visual language—marginal yet always in dialogue with the invisible forces of the world.
3. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Den lille moensomme, 1951, Estate of Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, © Estate of Sonja Ferlov Mancoba / Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024
Born in 1911 in Copenhagen to a cultured family, Sonja Ida Ferlov was drawn to the arts early. After initial studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, she quickly chose sculpture as her main mode of expression. Sonja developed an aesthetic deeply connected to organic forms, natural objects, and masks, which she encountered in European ethnographic collections, notably African art.
In the 1930s, amid Europe’s artistic effervescence, she immersed herself in the avant-garde. Moving to Paris in 1936 was decisive. She mingled with key surrealist and biomorphic abstraction figures: Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Max Ernst. This vibrant atmosphere fueled her search for a form of art neither purely abstract nor strictly figurative, but where forms evoke the human, nature, and mystery.
Her work embodies a tension between organic and geometric, archaic and modern. She drew on the aesthetics of African masks, newly rediscovered by European modernity as sources of “primitive” or “original” art. For her, these masks were “portals” to invisible states of being, spiritual entities, and symbols of the human condition.
Sonja was among the first women sculptors to experiment with assemblage sculpture, combining wood fragments, plaster, stone, and metal. This practice, straddling sculpture and art object, anticipated new conceptions of volume and space akin to the work of Giacometti and Calder.
A key work from this period is Levende grene (Living Branches, 1935), a wooden sculpture assembling found branches, polished and shaped. Here, the natural form is both respected and transformed, the tree becomes a body, a mask, a sign. This piece exemplifies Sonja’s dialogue between nature and culture, spontaneity and artistic intention.
During World War II, Sonja fled Denmark to Paris with her husband, South African painter Ernest Mancoba, himself a key figure in African abstraction. Together, they joined a community of engaged, exiled artists. This period was marked by intense artistic and personal commitment, with art becoming both refuge and political expression against violence and oppression.
In the 1950s and 60s, she worked intensively in bronze and plaster. The sculpture grew monumental and political. Le Combattant (The Warrior, 1961) is a landmark example: a powerful figure embodying resistance, struggle, and hope. The human form is suggested through purified volumes, with anatomical details absent but energy palpable.
Concurrently, Sonja engaged with themes of community and solidarity, as in Effort commun (Common Effort). Several intertwined bodies support one another, embodying through sculptural form the idea of mutual aid and collective resistance. This theme resonates with postwar social upheavals and the search for a new, human-centered world.
Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s multifaceted career crosses diverse cultural influences from Scandinavia to Africa, via Paris and the international avant-garde. Her work bridges vernacular traditions and modernity, primitivism and experimentation, always driven by a profound sensitivity to form as a manifestation of the invisible.
4. Maria Martins, L'impossible, Cast after the original from 1946, Fundação Itáu, São Paulo, © Estate Maria Martins, Photograph of Vicente de Mello
Born in Brazil in 1894, Maria Martins is a singular figure in Brazilian and surrealist art. From a wealthy background, she first trained in music before turning late to sculpture. Her nomadic life took her from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, New York, Ecuador, Japan, and Belgium, where she mastered wood, ceramics, and eventually bronze, the latter becoming her preferred material, which she worked with a unique lost-wax technique blending beeswax and grease to create sinuous, organic forms.
Her work is distinguished by hybrid figures blending female bodies, plants, and animals, inspired by Afro-Brazilian and Amazonian mythologies as well as classical myths. In 1940s New York, she moved in surrealist exile circles: André Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, with whom she had a liaison. Her work grew bolder and more complex, integrating desire, sexuality, and power in a plastic language combining sensuality and violence.
Her most famous work, The Impossible (after 1946), depicts two bodies stretched toward each other but unable to touch. Their heads are replaced by strange, tentacular forms evoking both seduction and menace. The sculpture expresses the tensions of desire, oscillating between attraction and suffering. She revisited this piece repeatedly, experimenting with versions that embody the complexity of human relations.
Maria Martins draws on reptilian and vine motifs, symbols of the Amazonian forest and vital pulse, to create a unique plastic language where bodies stretch, branch out, and defy domestication. Her work blends eroticism, violence, and spirituality in a surrealist poetics deeply rooted in Brazilian culture.
After permanently returning to Brazil in the 1950s, where her work was poorly received, Martins devoted herself to writing and poetry while helping found the Venice Biennale and Rio’s Museum of Modern Art. Her oeuvre remains a powerful, original voice in surrealism and modern sculpture history.
This exhibition invites us to reconsider Surrealism beyond painting and literature, emphasizing sculpture’s crucial, if often overlooked, role. Waldberg, Ferlov Mancoba, and Martins reveal how sculpture expands surrealist language into the three-dimensional realm, offering a tangible, corporeal, and material form to the movement’s dreamlike, subconscious impulses.
These sculptors transform surrealism into lived, physical experience, reminding us that the movement’s power lies not only in dreams but in the hands that shape form, in the material presence of objects that resist easy interpretation.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Bucerius Kunst Forum
Date: 21.2.2025 – 1.6.2025
Curators: Katharina Neuburger and Renate Wiehager
Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Bucerius Kunst Forum
Bucerius Kunst Forum
Alter Wall 12
DE-20 457 Hamburg
Phone: +49 0 40 36 09 96 0
Mail: info@buceriuskunstforum.de