Surrealist Forms

The present work was painted in 1941 when Mednikoff and Grace Pailthorpe were staying in California. They had exiled themselves there, leaving Liverpool for New York first in July 1940 and then settling in Berkeley in December. They crossed to Canada to settle in Vancouver in August 1942 where they worked, exhibited and spread the "gospel" of surrealism in papers, lectures and on the radio. The work is a summary of the typically Mednikovian vocabulary: body parts (eyes, breasts, tongues...) exemplifying what the child's unconscious is faced with before he pieces them together - the body as a series of unconnected parts which all haunt the child's mind. The child, unrepressed by rationality as he is, sees the body as a series of fluxes and liquids in which organs float and interact, between pleasure and terror. He is still in his mother's womb, blood-red and trying to extend his fingers (on the left hand side) to grasp all the organs he "sees". In most of his paintings, if not all, Mednikoff always re-becomes a child, trying to revisit his own pre-natal or uterine life.

We are very grateful to Michel Remy for preparing this catalogue entry.