International Art News

Salvador Dalí - Frontispiz für André Breton und Paul Éluard, L'immaculée Conception, 1930-Radierung Sammlung - Gilbert Kaplan, New York, Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama/VBK, Wien 2011

From November 30, 2011 to January 15, 2012 – Albertina
In parallel to the Magritte exhibition the Kaplan Collection will be presented, uniting outstanding Graphic Art by the Surrealists Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and many more important exponents of this art movement. These artists share a common devotion to the unreal and the fantastic. The Graphic Art presented in this exhibition will impressively illustrate how close the real and the unreal lie together in Surrealistic Art and will tempt the viewer to let his imagination  run free.

“Surrealism was a revolutionary idea in the arts in the early 1900s and 1920s, and is still a powerful influence on contemporary art,” according to McMullen Museum Curator Alston Conley. “These prints trace the development of the main figures in the surrealist movement from 1919 to 1971.”

Marcel Duchamp-H.O.O.Q., 1964 - Bleistift auf Reproduktion - Sammlung Gilbert Kaplan, New York, Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama/VBK, Wien 2011

The exhibition features over 100 prints by the foremost artists of the Surrealist movement. Works by Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Hans Bellmer, Yves Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and Man Ray will be among those included in the exhibition.

Museum Hours

Tarsila do Amaral A Negra, 1923 óleo sobre tela © 2011 Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo

From 6 October to 29 January 2012 – The Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo
Exhibition of 150 national and international works from the MAC collection. The aim of the show MODERNISM IN BRAZIL is to present the “Brazilian Modernism” (1917-1948) from a position that questions the vision of the art produced in the country during this period

Among the pieces on display, divided into five blocks , are works by artists like Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, Flavio de Carvalho, Di Cavalcanti, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Maria Martins, Giorgio Morandi, Iberê Camargo, Tomie Ohtake, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Leger, Victor Brecheret, Antonio Gomide, Henri Matisse, Alfredo Volpi, Alexander Calder, Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Marc Chagall, Ismael Nery, Lasar Segall, Raoul Duffy and many others.

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Salvador Dalí Rêve causé par le vol d’une abeille autour d’une pomme-grenade, une seconde avant l’éveil, 1944 Huile sur bois, 51 x 41 cm Musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation / 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich

From the 2nd of October 2011 – to the 29th of  January 2012 – Fondation Beyeler
This major exhibition on the art of Surrealism will provide insights into one of the most influential artistic and literary movements of the twentieth century. Born in the avant-garde metropolis of Paris, Surrealism was represented by such outstanding artist personalities as Dalí, Duchamp, Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte, Miró, Oppenheim and Picasso. In their often baffling and highly imaginative imagery, the Surrealists addressed the dream, the irrational, and the workings of the unconscious mind. On view in our spectacular exhibition will be over one hundred works from world-renowned museums and private collections.

Museum Hours

René Magritte | Belgium 1898-1967 | Les marches de l'été ( The summer steps) (detail) 1938 | Oil on canvas 60 x 73 cm | Purchased 1991 | Collection: Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

From June 11th to October 2nd 2011 – The Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA)
GoMA is the exclusive Australian venue for ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’, a landmark exhibition of surrealist works direct from the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
The Musée national d’art moderne, housed in Paris’s iconic Centre Pompidou, is one of the world’s best museum collections of modern and contemporary art. Its Surrealism collections are the finest in Europe — and the core of this collection is coming to GoMA. This exhibition presents more than 180 works by 56 artists, including paintings, sculptures, ‘surrealist objects’, films, photographs, drawings and collages. ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’ is an opportunity to see important art works that rarely leave Paris, in an exhibition that will provide a fascinating and comprehensive overview of this important artistic movement.
The exhibition presents a historical overview of Surrealism, charting its evolution from Dada experiments in painting, photography and film, through the metaphysical questioning and exploration of the subconscious in the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst; to the readymade objects of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s photographs.
Gaining traction in the early 1920s, the movement’s development is explored through the writings of Surrealism’s founder André Breton and key early works by André Masson. Also included is a remarkable selection of paintings and sculptures by surrealists Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Victor Brauner, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux.

Film and photography are also represented throughout the exhibition, including films by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, René Clair and Man Ray. Important photographic works by Hans Bellmer, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Eli Lotar and Jacques-André Boiffard also feature. The exhibition is rounded out with late works that show the breadth of Surrealism’s influence, and includes major works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Joseph Cornell.

Gallery Hours

François Bard - Paulette 2011 - oil on canvas - 195 x 150 cm.

Until the 11th of June 2011 – Mazel Galerie
The close centrings on the subject, the legs, the torsoes or faces put his work within an avant-gardist conception of painting, which has integrated the contribution of photography into contemporary art.

François Bard’s aesthetics is different from a large part of current painting which is influenced by the legacy of American Pop-Art or the new wave of Street Art, as his works are much closer to Edward Hopper, Giorgio de Chirico and Edouard Manet than to Andy Warhol.

His characters or his landscapes seem to be isolated within a space the boundaries of which are indefinite and allow us to escape « somewhere else ».
These large surface areas may evoke the desolate setting that is described in Dino Buzzati’s novel Tartars’Desert, one of his reference books.
The background which reveals endless surface areas focuses our attention on the subject, the small pieces of sentences and enigmatic words sprinkled on the surface of the canvasses.
The atmosphere which emanates from all these elements arouses the feeling that time is suspended and it conveys an unspeakable feeling of void.

The timelessness of his works is emphasized by choices in compositions which remind us of those made by masters of painting.
« Fait divers » or « No Man’s Land » are symptomatic of his taste for compositions drawn from famous names of the history of fine arts.
« L’Homme Mort » (« The Dead man ») which Edouard Manet painted between 1864 and 1865, depicting the body of a matador lying on the sand of the arena which itself refers to medieval sculpture and to the traditional countenance of recumbent statues, is a perfect illustration of this kinship.
Thanks to this centring, Manet gave his matador a Christ-like dimension, while François Bard gives his henchmen wearing gloves the appearance of peace-making angels, kinds of imaginary body-guards of a paranoid society which is afraid of the individuals who are part of it.
The artist fully assumes this biased view and claims that he is « on a sacred side of painting ».

However, far be it from him to establish a distance with those who watch his works, as his sources of inspiration and his models come from his daily life and  from people around him.
He asserts : « it is from daily life that I try to paint my imaginary world.»

But through his longing for timelessness and sublimation, the artist does talk about us in his paintings.
The link between his daily life and our world is to be seen in the realism and naturalism of his pictorial technique, strengthening the kinship between his work and Manet’s. Edouard Mazel

Galerie Hours

The Vestals - 1972 - Paul Delvaux - oil on canvas. 140 X 190 cm

Until October 2nd 2011 – Municipal Gallery of Athens
The second part of the exhibition“The George Economou Collection”will be on display at The Municipal Gallery of Athens until 2 October. The exhibition will focus on Surrealism, The School of Paris, Portrait-Nude-Still Life (1890-1996), Art of the first post-war decade, art in the 1960s, Neo-Fauves as well as prints from the collection.
The visitor will have the opportunity to view works by Giorgio de Chirico, JoanMiró, André Masson, Paul Delvaux, Graham Sutherland, Fernand Léger, Wilfredo Lam, Man Ray, René Magritte,Moise Kisling,Mikhail Larionov, EdgarMaxence, Ignacio Zuloaga, Karl Hofer, Pablo Picasso, Brassaï, Maurice Brianchon, Henri Rousseau, Maurice Utrillo, Jean Fautrier, Tamara de Lempicka, Duilio Barnabé, Hans Hartung, Asger Jorn, Jean-Paul Riopelle,Wolfgang Hollegha, Willemde Kooning, AndyWarhol, JimDine, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, César, Sigmar Polke, Robert Rauschenberg, Anselm Kiefer, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Jörg Immendorf, Georg Baselitz, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Arnulf Reiner and Gerhard  Richter.
Also on view are exceptional prints by André Beaudin, Juan Gris, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Laurens and David Hockney for C.P. Cavafy’s poetry. Leading Greek artists–Thanos Tsingos, Marios Prassinos and Theodoros Stamos – are also featured.
A large-format 536-page catalogue featuring essays and color reproductions has been publishedtogether with a free exhibition leaflet. The catalogue includes both parts of the exhibition, the first part closing on the 24th April with subjects from the 15th century to Rococo, The Realism of Academy, Impressionism, Vienna Secession, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Abstraction, NewObjectivity and drawings from the collection. The main purpose of the exhibition is to illustrate the artists’ tendencies, differentiations and ground-breaking achievements from the precursors of modernity to the late manifestations of the 1960s to the 1980s. However, works fromthe 15th to the 19th century are also included in the exhibition catalogue. Its strenght is characterised by the broad range of modern paintings, drawings and sculptures. The George Economou Collection is on display for the first time at The Municipal Gallery of Athens.

Gallery Hours