Toyen | City of Paris Museum of Modern Art

Born in Prague, Toyen devoted herself to a career systematically at the convergence of her century's most radical movements. At the heart of the Czech avant-garde, she and Jindrich

Styrsky (1899–1942) founded "Artificialism", claiming total identification "between painter and poet". Coming in the late 1920s, this movement was a striking

prefiguration of the "lyrical abstraction" of the 1950s. However, Toyen's concern with the erotic, together with her determination to explore new areas of awareness, brought

her closer to Surrealism. In 1934 she was one of the founders of the Czech Surrealist movement, and it was then that she became friends with Paul Éluard and André Breton. During the Second

World War, she hid the young Jewish poet Jindrich Heisler (1914–1953), while producing impressive series of drawings capturing the horror of the times. In 1948, refusing the totalitarianism

that was taking hold in Czechoslovakia, she moved to Paris to join Breton and the Surrealist group. Although she took part in all of its events, she occupied a place apart, pursuing her

exploration of the erotic through the link between desire and representation. Highly individual in every respect, Toyen constantly denied being a painter, despite being one of the rare

artists to reveal the depth and the subtleties of thinking in images, a method whose full visionary reach still remains untapped. The exhibition is organised by the Musée d'Art Moderne

de Paris, The National Gallery in Prague, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.