Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) was a printmaker, painter, sculptor and writer best known for her early surrealist imagery she would have a career spanning over 70 years. Born in the United States in the town of Galesburg, Illinois on August 25th to Swedish émigré’s, Tanning joined the Galesburg Public Library staff as an assistant. She became greatly influenced by the books surrounding her, even considering a literary career at one point. Although later in her life she began to write, producing a novel, autobiography and poems. In 1928 she started to study at a local liberal arts school called Knox College. After moving to Chicago and enrolling in the Chicago Academy of Art in 1930. She only managed to attend for three weeks considering herself as a self taught artist. Then moving to New York in 1935. After visiting Alfred H. Barr Jr’s exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, she described her visit as ‘an explosion, rocking me on my run-over heels. Here is the infinitely faceted world. I must have been waiting for. Here is the limitless expanse of possibility, a perspective having only incidentally to do with painting on surfaces. Her own surreal paintings would be discovered by the gallerist Julien Levym who would go on to introduce her to the artists of the surrealist circles both American and Europeans. Among these was Max Ernst who Tanning later married in 1946. Her works during this period are characterised as paintings of fleeting thoughts, dreams that lie inside our unconscious minds waiting to be unraveled or twisted into fantasises and fears.

After the war her and her husband, Max Ernst moved to Arizona enabling both to gain a new perspective on their careers. During the 1940s her work rendered figures most commonly girls, set upon settings that were described as dreamscapes. The paintings showed a twisted a depiction of Tannings own adolescence and upbringing. These themes becoming common in her from this time, producing bodies of paintings that illustrate her girlhood. They have an uncanniness to them that sets the viewer on edge upon viewing. The fantasies in Tannings mind are pushed across each painting complicit in surrealism as an idea, illuminating her own idioms. Her paintings become increasingly enigmatic with suggest narratives exploring the ambitious as the 1940s go by.

In this time she produced a series of prints always working with highly esteemed print makers. The prints were commonly made for illustrated books alongside her surrealist friends. Despite the skill of her prints they have not been regularly exhibited like her paintings and drawings.

By the 1950s Tanning had moved to Paris which was on the frontline for the abstract expressionism movement at the time. Which was allowing her to have the ability to reinvent her style and move away from surrealism which she was then known for. The shift was shown, her work yielding to a greater level of abstraction. Exploring shapes that were enigmatic in itself.  Her printmaking flourished in this time period as well becoming very accomplished. Through the 1960s Tanning explored light, shapes and colour in transient atmospheres

Throughout Tannings lifetime she had an amount of prominent U.S and international shows. In 2018 she was the subject of of retrospective at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, which traveled to the Tate Modern in London until 2019.