The most comprehensive exhibition of Surrealist art ever to be shown in this country is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery May 28, 2011 through September 25, 2011. The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art features 350 works by leading Surrealist artists, including André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Leonora Carrington, Brassaï, André Masson, Man Ray, Edith Rimmington, Wifredo Lam and many others.
Guest curated by Dawn Ades, internationally renowned expert on Surrealist art, The Colour of My Dreams will be shown exclusively at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Ades has selected works of art that underscore the Surrealists’ radical sense of experimentation and the expansive range of mediums in which they worked, including painting, sculpture, collage, photography and film. The exhibition provides a stunning overview of one of most important movements of the 20th century and features a number of signature works by more than 80 artists including Dali’s Lobster Telephone, Ernst’s The Forest, Miró’s Photo: This is the Colour of My Dreams, Giacometti’s Spoon Woman, Carrington’s The House Opposite and Man Ray’s Emak-Bakia, among many others. It will also reveal, for the first time, the Surrealists’ passionate interest in indigenous art of the Pacific Northwest and the little-known influence of early Hollywood cinema on the development of Surrealist film.
This historic exhibition brings together loans from more than sixty of the world’s foremost private collections, museums and galleries, including the Guggenheim, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the Israel Museum, the Musée du quai Branly, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and Tate.
“This is an unprecedented exhibition that was four years in the making,” said Gallery director Kathleen Bartels, “So many of the investigations done by the Surrealist artists continue to reverberate in contemporary art. We are delighted to have the opportunity to share the masterpieces of this tremendously influential movement with Canada, and – especially – to tell the story of Surrealism’s special relationship with British Columbia and this part of the world.”
André Breton wrote the first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, launching a movement which continues to exert a powerful influence. Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s own investigations, Breton was fascinated by dreams and set out to create an artistic process which would tap directly into the unconscious mind and dreams freeing artists from what he saw as “false rationality.”
The installation of the exhibition is designed to create a variety of environments and moods in which to contemplate the themes that the Surrealists explored over a period of three decades such as desire, androgyny, violence and transmutation. The exhibition also highlights the many techniques developed by Surrealist artists including automatism, frottage, fumage, Rayographs and ‘the surrealist object,’ an approach to sculpture in which several unrelated components—most often found objects—were joined together.
Image: Edith Rimmington The Oneiroscopist, 1947 oil on canvas The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art in the Israel Museum Photo: © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
VANCOUVER ART GALLERY 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver
www.vanartgallery.bc.ca