Untitled (erotic Surrealist landscape)

Pamela Boden

Pamela Boden didn't truly begin pursuing visual art until her late twenties, after trying her hand as an erotic author while living in the South of France in the 1920s. Her introduction to the Parisian Avant Garde was likely the source of her inspiration, surrounded as she was by the exciting, daring world of Surrealists, Dadists, and Cubists. She began with decorative panel carving, painting, and drawing while living with her lover, the Portuguese writer and filmmaker Virginia de Castro e Almeida, in Lisbon. Eventually, she would find her path as a sculptor, but not before extensive travel - captured in the cerebral drawings that would later influence her powerful three dimensional work.

The late 1930s and early '40s were a period of both artistic and personal exploration for Boden, and her work from this time exhibits a refreshing glitch in the narrative of many Western women of the time. As seen in this erotic Surrealist image, Boden is unafraid of the implications her sketches of women's bodies - here seen as an extension of an alien landscape - might arouse. In 1940, around the time of this drawing's execution, she was invited to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition of Portugal, titled EXPoem Esculture e Pintura which took place at the Repe House in Lisbon.