Marianna Simnett plunges into surreal territory at the Max Ernst Museum

From January through early summer twenty twenty six, Max Ernst Museum becomes the setting for an immersive and unsettling new chapter in contemporary surrealism. Headless, a solo exhibition by Marianna Simnett, brings together new and earlier works in an expansive installation that unfolds like a lucid dream, disorienting, seductive and charged with symbolic tension.

Opening on January thirtieth, the exhibition positions Simnett’s multidisciplinary practice within a lineage that reaches back to Surrealism, while firmly anchoring it in the anxieties and mythologies of the present moment.

A dreamscape of fractured realities

Headless moves fluidly across media. Video, artificial intelligence, sculpture, painting and music converge to create an environment where meaning slips and reforms. Viewers are invited into a maze of uncanny encounters, where bodies transform, identities fracture and narrative remains deliberately unstable.

Simnett’s work has long explored power, control and transformation, often through visceral imagery that unsettles as much as it attracts. Here, that language expands into a fully realised world, one that resists linear reading and instead asks to be experienced intuitively.

A dialogue with Max Ernst

The exhibition takes its title from La femme 100 têtes, the nineteen twenty nine collage novel by Max Ernst, whose influence runs throughout the show. Ernst’s book, loosely translated as The Hundred Headless Woman, presented a sequence of enigmatic images that blurred logic, identity and narrative, often featuring his feathered alter ego Loplop.

Simnett draws directly from this source in a new series of paintings produced especially for the exhibition. Rather than revisiting Surrealism as a historical style, she treats it as a living method. Ernst’s fractured imagery becomes a framework through which Simnett weaves together contemporary events, mythology and her own alter egos, creating hybrid narratives that feel both ancient and acutely current.

Past and present fold into one another. The political bleeds into the personal. Fantasy becomes a lens through which reality is refracted.

Curated tension and expansion

Curated by Madeleine Frey and Sarah Louisa Henn, Headless is carefully paced to heighten its psychological charge. Works are not isolated but allowed to echo and clash, reinforcing the sense of a world in flux.

An accompanying catalogue, published by Hirmer Publishers, extends the exhibition’s reach beyond the museum walls. Featuring contributions from Cecilia Alemani, Madeleine Frey, Sarah Louisa Henn and Lisa Tuttle, the publication situates Simnett’s work within broader conversations around Surrealism, contemporary image making and speculative futures.

Surrealism without nostalgia

What makes Headless particularly compelling is its refusal to romanticise Surrealism. Instead, Simnett treats it as a tool for navigating the present. Her work acknowledges the movement’s fascination with the unconscious and the uncanny, while using those ideas to interrogate modern systems of power, identity and technology.

The result is an exhibition that feels at once playful and disturbing, theatrical yet deeply controlled. It does not offer resolution. It offers immersion.

Running from January thirty first to July fifth twenty twenty six, Headless positions Marianna Simnett as an artist in active conversation with art history, not looking back, but pulling it forward into unfamiliar and provocative terrain.