'Constantly torn by the desire to escape and the protective need to stay at home, I envied the privilege of the snail who can move around with his house,' wrote the surrealist artist Bona de Mandiargues. She regularly drew and painted snails throughout her career, calling them 'lunar and moody' animals. 'By embracing the shapes of the spiral,' she said, 'I'm embracing the very structure of the universe.'
La Mano del Pittore / The Painter's Hand
1992, textile and acrylic on canvas by Bona de Mandiargues (1926–2000) 
Born in Italy in 1926, de Mandiargues was a key figure in the revival of surrealism in the second half of the twentieth century. Surrealism first developed in the 1910s and 1920s in Paris, characterised by an effort to free the unconscious mind. Surrealist painters and writers practised things like automatic drawing, in which they drew without plan or direction. They often tried to depict their dreams or other fantastical imaginings.
By the time de Mandiargues began working and exhibiting in the 1950s, surrealism was a long-established school of artmaking, no longer trendy or avant-garde. Driven by a desire to express her innermost thoughts and feelings, de Mandiargues came to it organically. She was mentored by her uncle, the painter Filippo de Pisis, with whom she lived in Venice as a young woman. While living there, de Mandiargues was flooded with the influences of centuries of Italian art, including Renaissance works and the more contemporary work of Giorgio di Chirico.
In the 1940s, de Mandiargues travelled to Paris, where she met many of the defining members of the original Surrealist group including André Breton, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Meret Oppenheim, Hans Bellmer, Leonor Fini and Man Ray. They had a seismic impact on her, helping her look inwards and find her own tools of self-expression in her art. The surrealist impulse to interrogate one's own inner desires, dreams and fantasies without concern for convention defined de Mandiargues's work. She also met her husband, the writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues, while in Paris. She married him in 1948.
They had a challenging relationship that ended in separation in the 1950s. After parting ways with her husband, de Mandiargues travelled to Mexico, which also deeply influenced her work. Breton had referred to Mexico as 'the most Surrealist country in the world,' which points to why its visual culture resonated so deeply with Mandiargues. She was particularly inspired by Mexican textile arts and began using fabric and sewing techniques in her own work.
She collaged fabrics onto her painted canvases, creating multimedia works that combined elements of painting, sewing, collage and quiltmaking into one work. She called this practice 'ragarts'. Originally, she used scraps of her husband's clothes, finding a sense of closure in cutting up his garments and remaking them into a new whole.
Autoritratto / Self-portrait
1994, textile and acrylic on canvas by Bona de Mandiargues (1926–2000) 
A key theme running through de Mandiargues's work is androgyny. The snail, a major motif for her, is an androgynous or hermaphroditic animal, meaning it is both male and female from a reproductive perspective. This was one part of its allure for de Mandiargues, who was seeking multiplicity and expansiveness in her life and her work. She wanted to free herself from categories or the sense of being boxed in by expectations from society or people she knew.
There is also a strong eroticism throughout her works, with explicit images of genitalia and romantic embraces. These are themes for many surrealists, especially surrealist women, such as Ithell Colquhoun and Leonor Fini. These works have the power to shock and discomfit viewers, but they also have a sense of vulnerability in the rawness of their examination of desire and sexuality.
The feminine form and the experience of living in a female body were also major subjects for de Mandiargues. Her images of deconstructed female bodies draw attention to the way women are the victims of contradictory demands and unceasing expectations to present themselves according to the boundaries of beauty and respectability. These works are about disrupting those expectations, striving to create a new way of seeing feminine bodies.
Les Corps Entrelaces / The Interlaced Bodies
1977, colour pencil on paper by Bona de Mandiargues (1926–2000) 
Alongside her multimedia 'ragarts' works, de Mandiargues continued to maintain a strong drawing practice throughout her career. She uses a rainbow of colours even in her works on paper, giving them a vibrancy that leaps off the page. Her drawings echo the themes and designs of her works on canvas, with their spiralling, humanoid forms that are both joyful and slightly creepy. Her work continued to walk the line between those two poles throughout her career, pushing at assumptions of gender, pleasure and consciousness.
Eliza Goodpasture, Commissioning Editor, Drawings
This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation
'Bona de Mandiargues', curated by Simon Grant, is open at Alison Jacques until 28th June 2025
