Shapeshifting: Dorothea Tanning, Elsa Thoresen, Isabelle Zetterström, Jenny Palén

Shapeshifting

Dorothea Tanning, Elsa Thoresen, Isabelle Zetterström, Jenny Palén

Co-curated by Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar

A form becomes recognisable through the associations it permits. A contour suggests a body; a surface evokes a landscape; an organic structure appears to belong to several possible organisms. When these associations coexist without resolving into a stable identity, recognition becomes uncertain. Shapeshifting brings together four artists whose practices explore the imaginative and psychological possibilities of this uncertainty.

Across the work of Dorothea Tanning, Elsa Thoresen, Isabelle Zetterström, Jenny Palén, metamorphosis operates through the construction of images, their material realisation and the meanings they acquire. The exhibition approaches Surrealism through this capacity for transformation, examining how its historical concerns with dreams and unconscious association continue to inform questions of perception, identity and artistic production.

Gaston Bachelard’s account of imagination offers a philosophical framework for this enquiry. In Air and Dreams (1943), he emphasises the capacity of imagination to transform the images supplied by perception, releasing them from their initial identities and bringing them into unexpected relationships. Developed through his study of literary imagination, this argument allows metamorphosis to be understood as a principle of imaginative activity. An image remains open through its capacity to generate further associations. Applied to the exhibition, Bachelard’s thinking directs attention to the movement through which a form becomes available to several readings.

In Dorothea Tanning’s painting, transformation extends into the organisation of pictorial space. From the mid-1950s, her increasingly fragmented compositions complicate the distinction between figures and their surroundings. Forms merge and interrupt one another, making the act of identification provisional. Tanning described wanting to lead the eye into spaces that simultaneously concealed, revealed and transformed. Painting becomes a means of sustaining this tension within visibility itself. Her wider practice, encompassing soft sculpture and writing, develops the relationship between bodily suggestion, material presence and imaginative association through different forms of expression.

Elsa Thoresen approaches transformation through the imaginative reorganisation of the natural world. An important participant in Scandinavian Surrealism, she developed a visual language informed by organic structures, including driftwood, and fantastic landscapes. Her later movement towards biomorphic abstraction loosened the relationship between these structures and identifiable objects while retaining their associations with living matter. Within the exhibition, this development supports a reading of abstraction as a continuation of Surrealist enquiry. Transformation persists as recognisable subjects recede, becoming embedded in the relationships between shapes and in their capacity to suggest unfamiliar forms of life.

For Isabelle Zetterström, the instability of form is closely connected to the changing constitution of the self. Her imagined landscapes contain growths whose associations move between anatomy, vegetation and unfamiliar organisms. In the paintings developed for this exhibition, light and shadow articulate the relationships between outward presentation, idealised identity and experiences that remain partially concealed. She describes a self in which earlier states continue to act upon the present. Darkness consequently acquires an ambivalent function: it can evoke discomfort and fear while also suggesting protection. The paintings give perceptible form to these conflicting functions, allowing emotional experience to emerge before it becomes fully available to explanation.

Jenny Palén’s account of her practice likewise places understanding within an unfolding process. An image or sensation may initiate a work whose significance becomes apparent only after its completion. Her movement between painting, sculpture, installation and film follows the developing demands of an idea. Existing works remain active within this process: a shape, colour or object encountered again in the studio can return in a different configuration. Dreams and meditation contribute images whose vividness is accompanied by difficulty in retaining them. Transformation therefore operates across materials and through time, as the work acquires meanings that were unavailable at the moment of its production. Humour introduces a further ambiguity, allowing pleasure, absurdity and unease to coexist.

These practices also invite a phenomenological consideration of looking. In Eye and Mind, Maurice Merleau-Ponty situates vision within our bodily participation in the visible world. The perceiving subject belongs to the world being perceived, and painting arises from this involvement. His account provides a way to reconsider the separation between an interior psychological reality and an external environment. Applied here, it suggests that the recognition of bodily, vegetal or spatial forms draws upon our lived experience of inhabiting a body and moving through the world.

The uncertainty encountered in these images consequently concerns the viewer as well as the represented form. Associations develop, compete and change during the act of looking. Shapeshifting names this reciprocal process, in which an image’s resistance to a settled identity exposes the habits through which recognition takes place. The exhibition locates a continuing possibility of Surrealism in that encounter: a form can become perceptible while remaining capable of changing what we understand it to be.

Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar, co-curator
November 2026