Tamer

Hannah Höch's artwork, Tamer, is a photomontage created around 1930. It is characterized by its exploration of gender roles and identity, a recurring theme in Höch's work. The piece features a large female mannequin head placed atop a muscular male body, with a sea lion in the corner. This juxtaposition challenges traditional notions of gender and power, leaving ambiguous who is "taming" whom.1

Höch was a key figure in the Berlin Dada group, known for her provocative photomontages that critiqued perceptions of gender and ethnic differences during the Weimar era. Dada was an anti-art movement that emerged during World War I, rejecting bourgeois values and conventional artistic methods. Dadaists often used photomontage, a technique involving the arrangement of photographic fragments, to express their disillusionment. While Dada focused on negation and critique, Surrealism, which grew out of Dada, emphasized positive expression while retaining an interest in the irrational and the bizarre.123