The Shooting Gallery VI 1940

Toyen’s “Shooting Gallery VI” is an ink drawing with an open invitation to play. The mark-making is just point after point, these tiny dots accumulate into tone, a real investment of time. And what do we get? Such an odd staging! The surface feels endless, like a tabletop after a party swept clean-ish, populated by a menagerie of characters. There’s the fish skewered by a fox’s head, a broken screen with another fish head hanging in it, a random chestnut leaf, and little birds everywhere. That broken screen is the real key for me: it’s falling apart, literally deconstructed, which opens all sorts of possibilities. It reminds me of Dorothea Tanning, another surrealist, because both artists were making their own realities through painting. The work embraces a kind of ambiguity, one that opens the doors to seeing and thinking in different ways.