Helen Bremm (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in History of Art at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, researching tempera and its polyvalent meaning in the work of three surrealist artists in the United States and Mexico in the 1940s–60s: Leonora Carrington (1917–2011), Sylvia Fein (1919–2024), and Gerrie Gutmann (1921–69). Her research interests include Surrealism in the Americas, British artists in Mexico, as well as epistemologies of making, material iconographies, and feminist philosophies of materiality. In 2021, she interned at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam and worked on the exhibition Surrealism and Magic. In 2022, she co-convened the British Art Network event Curating Magic.
With a background in Technical Art History (MA, Stockholms Universitet, 2018–20) and as visiting researcher at the LANCIC-Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2023), Helen co-organized the first technical study of a work by Leonora Carrington. She is currently the co-lead of the Paul Mellon Centre-funded project “Leonora Carrington’s Tempera Paintings, c.1945–47,” a collaborative project at the University of Cambridge Museums with West Dean College for Arts and Conservation and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.
