Rightfully included in the surrealist elite along with Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and Dora Maar, Bona skirted the second wave of Surrealism, informalism and assemblage and left Europe to cross the Atlantic. Her work arose from an “alchemical” search of the self, which identified in the themes of metamorphosis, animal totemism and the fantastic the tools to express a fragmented, kaleidoscopic identity. From the 1970s on she began identifying with the snail, a hermaphrodite and an ambivalent figure, at once both friendly and repugnant, symbol of the androgynous, of fragility, of strength, and of the perpetual agitation of her restless mind.
