“Freedom is not given to you — you have to take it.”
Meret Oppenheim is often remembered through one image: a teacup, saucer and spoon covered in fur. That work, Object or Breakfast in Fur, made her famous in 1936 and became one of the most recognisable objects of Surrealism. But to reduce Oppenheim to that single work is to repeat the very problem her art resisted: the fixing of a woman, an object or an image into one readable role.
Oppenheim’s importance lies not only in making strange objects. It lies in the way she changed the status of the object itself. A cup no longer remains a cup. A glove no longer remains a glove. A piece of jewellery no longer remains decoration. Through material displacement, humour, erotic charge and psychological ambiguity, she made familiar things unstable. She showed that an object can escape its assigned function.
Born in Berlin in 1913 and raised largely in Switzerland, Oppenheim moved to Paris as a young artist in the early 1930s. There she entered the Surrealist circle around André Breton, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Surrealism gave her a field in which dream, desire, object, body and unconscious thought could collide. But Oppenheim was never simply a muse of Surrealism. She was one of its most radical makers.
Her famous Object began with an ordinary tea set. Covered in fur, it became impossible to use in the normal way. The cup invites the mouth, but the material repels it. The object remains recognisable, yet its function collapses. What was once linked to refinement, domestic ritual and polite consumption becomes tactile, erotic, absurd and faintly disturbing. The work is powerful because it does not add meaning from outside. It changes the object from within.
This is central to Oppenheim’s practice. She understood that materials carry behaviour. Fur, leather, metal, stone, bone, fabric, hair or food do not only create surfaces; they change how we imagine touch, use, desire and repulsion. Her work moves between attraction and discomfort. It asks what happens when something familiar becomes bodily, and when something beautiful becomes difficult to approach.
The artistic form she worked with was not one form only. Oppenheim made sculpture, assemblage, painting, drawing, collage, poetry, jewellery, design, costume and public work. Her practice moved between Surrealism and what would later be understood as conceptual art. She was interested less in one stable style than in the freedom of thought that allowed an image, object or body to shift identity.
That freedom was hard won. The success of Object gave Oppenheim international recognition, but it also trapped her. The public wanted the artist of the fur teacup. The art world often treated her through that one object, while the wider scope of her six-decade practice remained less visible outside Switzerland for a long time. Her career included periods of crisis, withdrawal and renewed production. She continued to make work across media, but much of that work did not enter the broad public imagination with the same force as Object.
This partial disappearance matters. It is not that Oppenheim vanished from art history, but that she was made too narrow within it. The woman became attached to one object. The object became attached to one reading. The artist’s wider intelligence was reduced by the fame of the very work that made her visible.
Recent museum exhibitions have begun to correct that. The major retrospective Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition brought together nearly two hundred works and showed the range of her practice across painting, sculpture, assemblage, relief, jewellery design, works on paper and collage. The exhibition was presented by Kunstmuseum Bern, the Menil Collection in Houston and MoMA in New York. This was important not because it rediscovered Oppenheim, but because it allowed the public to see her beyond the teacup: as an artist of lifelong innovation, wit, risk and formal freedom.
Where is her work visible today? Her most famous work, Object, is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and is associated with MoMA’s Surrealist objects galleries. Other works are held by institutions including Kunstmuseum Bern, the Menil Collection context, MoMA and major modern and contemporary collections. Her archive and parts of her legacy are closely connected to Bern, where Oppenheim lived and worked for many years. Yet even now, for many viewers, she remains more recognisable through one object than through the full complexity of her practice.
That is why Oppenheim remains urgent for a new generation.
She understood that freedom is not simply a theme. It is a material act. In 1975, when she received the Art Award of the City of Basel, she said: “Freedom is not given to you — you have to take it.” That sentence is not only biographical. It is a key to her work. Her objects take freedom by refusing obedience. They refuse to remain domestic, feminine, decorative, functional, tasteful, polite or fully explained.
This also makes her important from a feminist perspective, although she resisted being confined to the category of “feminine art.” Oppenheim was interested in a more fluid creativity in which masculine and feminine forces could operate together. Her work does not simply claim a feminine identity. It unsettles the categories through which gender is assigned, consumed and interpreted. Her objects often feel androgynous, erotic, comic, threatening and tender at the same time.
The value she offers today is Uncanny Freedom.
Uncanny Freedom is the freedom of an object to escape its assigned function, and the freedom of a body or image to refuse a fixed meaning. It is not smooth liberation. It is stranger than that. It appears when a surface becomes too intimate, when beauty becomes difficult, when a familiar object begins to behave like a body, and when the viewer can no longer remain comfortable.
This value connects directly to Conversation Pieces / Post-Colonial Gold. A wearable sculpture in dialogue with Oppenheim does not need to quote fur, teacups or Surrealist motifs. It needs to translate the force beneath them: the charged object, the unstable surface, the refusal of polite function, the moment when adornment becomes disturbance.
In this context, a ring can stop being a ring in the conventional sense. It can remain wearable while resisting the role of decoration. It can carry body, skin, memory, humour, discomfort and glamour at once. The hand becomes the place where the object is activated. What was once a closed sculptural form becomes a site of contact.
This is where Kate Moss can function as an iconic resonance. Not as celebrity endorsement, but as cultural access. Moss represents a form of glamour that is not obedient, polished or fully available. Her image carries fragility and control, exposure and distance, beauty and damage. Like Oppenheim’s objects, Moss unsettles the surface. She shows that glamour becomes stronger when it is not clean, healthy, finished or easy to consume.
Oppenheim and Moss do not meet through style. They meet through disturbance. Oppenheim makes the object strange. Moss makes glamour unstable. Both refuse the idea that beauty should behave.
For Post-Colonial Gold, this matters because gold is not used as luxury or status, but as a marker of revaluation. The object becomes a portable archive of value: not a decorative accessory, but a physical and digital entry point into art, thought and self-knowledge. Through a unique ID and QR code, the wearable object can connect to the artist, the iconic resonance, the value, the material reference and the immersive context behind the work.
What Oppenheim gives us now is not nostalgia for Surrealism. She gives us a method for resisting fixed meaning. She shows that an object can be familiar and dangerous at the same time. She shows that function can be broken, that beauty can disturb, and that freedom begins when things refuse to stay where they have been placed.
Meret Oppenheim did not make strange objects for effect. She made objects that escaped obedience.
Value
Uncanny Freedom
The freedom of an object, image or body to escape its assigned function, surface or meaning.
What we can learn from her now
Meret Oppenheim shows that beauty is not most powerful when it is smooth, useful or easily understood. It becomes powerful when it disturbs expectation, changes function and opens another way of seeing.
Where her work can be seen
Key works by Meret Oppenheim are held in major public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her broader practice has been presented in recent major retrospectives at Kunstmuseum Bern, the Menil Collection in Houston and MoMA, where paintings, sculptures, assemblages, jewellery designs, works on paper and collages showed the range of her six-decade career.
Works less visible to the public
The public image of Oppenheim has long been dominated by Object / Breakfast in Fur. Much of her wider practice — including paintings, drawings, jewellery designs, collages, reliefs, poetry and later works — has historically been far less visible internationally. It is not that these works disappeared entirely, but that they were overshadowed by the fame of one object and remained less accessible to a broad public outside specialist collections, archives and exhibitions.
