Meret Oppenheim

Face in Cloud

1971

A rounded, grey form fills the picture – soft, organic, indeterminate. At first glance: a cloud. Yet at its centre sits an oval decorative frame, and within it a face with sharp, clearly defined features. The familiar and the foreign collide. Meret Oppenheim returned repeatedly to the cloud motif in the 1960s and 1970s. The cloud fascinated her as a symbol of change – formless, fleeting, never to be held. In this relief of 1971, she reverses precisely this quality: the cloud becomes a solid sculptural body, a tangible sculpture. What is by its very nature incorporeal acquires weight and contour. This tension between opposites is no accident but method. In many of her works, Oppenheim juxtaposed materials and ideas that do not belong together, generating from this a productive contradiction. The medallion with its elegant, sharp-edged face, intensifies this effect: nothing could be more foreign to the nebulous cloud than a framed portrait. The title ‘Gesicht in den Wolken’ connects the two and makes the disparate elements legible without resolving them. Translation generated using AI Original contribution by  Kathleen Bühler in: Kunstmuseum Bern (ed.), Merets Funken. Die Sammlung Gegenwartskunst 2, Kerber Verlag: Bielefeld, 2013, p. 196.

plaster [rugosite] in an oval wood frame, embellished, on a plaster mould [rugosite] with textile and threads, painted with oil and aquarelle

H 39 cm, B 39 cm, T 13 cm (Object)

Hermann und Margrit Rupf-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern