David Lomas

David Lomas is Professor of Art History at the University of Manchester. He is co-director, with Dawn Ades, of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies. Trained in medicine as well as art history, the relationship between Surrealism and the culture of medicine, psychology and psychoanalysis has been central to his work. His publications on Surrealism include the book The Haunted Self. A new book, Simulating the Marvellous, explores the theme of simulation in late19th century psychology and medicine and considers its significance for Surrealism’s attempts to appropriate the resources of the unconscious through automatic writing and other means. A new research project concerning botany and art, the subject of a forthcoming book, looks at post-Linnaean botany as the source of an expanded conception of the erotic and sexuality that percolates into surrealist and more recent art. This project also informs his interest in botanical themes and motifs in the work of Hilma af Klint.