Surreal Solihull is dream destination

SURREALISM has arrived on the streets of Solihull. The new exhibition, which I have curated, celebrates the borough's links to this strangest of modern art movements that saw artists and writers take inspiration from their dreams, thoughts and nightmares.

- RUTH MILLINGTON

There's undoubtedly a nightmarish feel to Paul Newman's mixed media painting 'Rumination Beetle in Mell Square, which sees a monster scaling the walls of the town's shopping centre. Nostalgia plays a part in this fantastical scene by an artist who grew up in Solihull and continues to draw on his early love of movie monsters.

Meanwhile, Paul Lemmon's pixelated painting features mythical animals, aquatic creatures, birds, human figures and faces. He says: "This artwork depicts the subconscious as an oceanic force of fantasy, acting as a tribute to Emmy Bridgwater's creative mind. The title is adapted from her 1942 surrealist poem, Storm Trip"

He's one of 29 commissioned artists who have created bold new work in the spirit of Bridgwater, a great, yet overlooked, Surrealist who once called the borough home. At the end of her successful career and life, she was cutting and pasting subversive collages from a care home in Solihull.

Decades earlier, in 1936, Edgbaston-born Bridgwater attended The International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Here, she watched Salvador Dalí deliver a lecture while wearing a full deep-sea diving suit, and Sheila Legge strut through the show dressed as The Phantom of Sex Appeal, carrying a prosthetic leg.