To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Surrealism, Liss Llewellyn is delighted to present a special online exhibition exploring one of the most influential artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the twentieth century.

This exhibition brings together works by some of the key British practitioners. It features a superlative early painting by John Armstrong – Washing Day – which was included in the artist’s first one-man show at the Leicester Galleries in 1928. This ‘triumphantly original’ picture (as described by Anthony Bertram in The Studio, 1928), with its Constructivist, intersecting planes, was more advanced than anything being made in Britain at the time.

The show also includes works by Cecil Stephenson, who shared in Armstrong’s fascination with Greek mythology (see Perseus and Andromeda, 1945), in addition to John Banting’s Sylph Melody which contains the amorphous, human-like shapes and disguised profile portraits found in many of the artist’s major works.

Moreover, the exhibition features pictures by female European Surrealists such as Esphyr Slobodkina, Rachel Baes, and Suzanne Van Damme, whose remarkable work lobbied for gender parity in the male-dominated world of Surrealist art.