Between dream and trauma, body and machine, beauty and disturbance, the Max Ernst Museum Brühl presents a fascinating solo exhibition by British artist Marianna Simnett (born 1986). Entitled "Headless," it invites visitors on an expedition into the unconscious of the present and transposes the radical legacy of surrealism into today's world. Simnett is one of the outstanding voices of her generation: in her work, disciplines, identities, and states of perception blur, and boundaries between the human, the mechanical, and the virtual dissolve.

The exhibition brings together new works with key pieces from previous years. Video, sculpture, painting, sound, and AI-supported processes merge into a labyrinthine overall experience in which sensory impressions overlap and familiar orders dissolve. Here, humans become posthuman beings: bodies appear fragile, skin like a membrane, voices like echoes, thoughts like algorithms. Simnett confronts the audience with a world in which the familiar becomes alien, the known becomes uncanny—an aesthetic experience that is both disturbing and fascinating.
The title "Headless" is a deliberate reference to Max Ernst's legendary collage novel La femme 100 têtes (1929). Like Ernst, Simnett combines disparate elements to create new, uncanny constellations: hybrid creatures, algorithmic shadows, artificial bodies, and mythical allusions populate her visual worlds. Where Ernst used collage as a technique of liberation, Simnett works with digital processes and AI. Her "headless" gaze is both analytical and sensual, dreamlike and rational, questioning identity in an era in which subjectivity and machine, inner and outer worlds, intuition and algorithm are inextricably linked.

Marianna Simnett, Headless #1, 2025, oil on canvas, Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin, Photo: Thomas Müller

Particularly impressive are the paintings created for Brühl, in which she refers directly to Femme 100 têtes. The works are visual allegories of power, control, desire, and the fragility of the human body. At the same time, they reflect today's debate about technology and artificial intelligence: reality is fragmented, dissolved, and reassembled. Each installation, each video, each sound space is an attempt to explore the boundaries between art and life, control and dissolution, dream and reality.
"Headless" is a journey through reflections, fragments, and echoes—a posthuman surrealist experience that amazes, confuses, and inspires visitors. At the Max Ernst Museum Brühl, a place that has always combined fantasy, illusion, and consciousness, Simnett spans a century of artistic imagination between Ernst's visions and the digital present. The result is a work that not only challenges the eye, but also the imagination: What lies beneath the visible surface – and what does it mean to be human today?
January 31 to July 5, 2026
www.maxernstmuseum.lvr.de