When the Strange Is Familiar and the Familiar Strange: Surrealism Turns 100
“This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass,” André Breton wrote in 1924. “Existence is elsewhere.” His Manifesto of Surrealism propelled a global, revolutionary art movement that defined 20th-century cultural history. Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary this year, Surrealism continues to illuminate invisible shapes and forces through an evolving canon as well as in the works of contemporary artists reckoning with its heritage.
Surrealism on the international stage
Surrealism’s core message was one of championing radical freedom of thought and modern experiments in literature and visual arts. The strange becomes familiar; the familiar becomes strange. It disrupted figurative realism, logical thinking and rationalism, an emancipatory desire shaped in response to the horrors of World War I and the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis with its daring understanding of the unconscious, enriched by encounters with other movements such as Dadaism. Its sweeping potential was explored by a group of artists who gravitated around Paris, yet its reach extended beyond the cafes of Montmartre. In 1938, the International Surrealist Exhibition sought to convene multicultural propositions on dream imagery, symbolism, “automatic” creation and visual illusions.
Today’s ever-growing celebration of iconic women artists such as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo confirms a sharp interest in feminizing and globalizing the Surrealist canon outside its usual household names—Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst or René Magritte just to name a few. While the Mexico-based surrealists have benefited from much attention recently—the 2022 Venice Biennale honored Carrington’s Milk of Dreams and a new edition of her novel The Stone Door is forthcoming—Surrealism also imprinted other parts of the globe.
For example, in the Arab world, Surrealism resonated with cultural movements and schools seeking to liberate the arts from traditional impositions. In Egypt, painter Ahmed Morsi recreated eerie anthropomorphic tableaux that redefined the expanse of landscapes, often nodding to his native Alexandria with seascapes and scenes wrapped in variations of poetic blue. Morsi juxtaposes otherworldly, mythological characters who seem to exist outside conventional time and space, a dislocated feeling that echoes a sense of loss. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami presented a much-anticipated survey of Morsi’s works earlier this year. Adonis, towering Arab poet and modernist intellectual, wrote an entire book-length essay on the commonalities between Surrealism and Sufism in their shared quest for the Absolute. For Japanese artist Ichiro Fukuzawa, who studied in France during the 1920s and influenced numerous post-war Japanese artists, Surrealism was strongly correlated with social justice and criticism against the rise of Japanese imperialism (he was arrested by military authorities in 1941). In the Caribbean, Surrealism engaged with négritude, including via syncretic religions such as Santería. These are only a few examples showing how Surrealism in visual arts intersected with local contexts, often with a political tint.
Surrealism in contemporary art
This anniversary is an opportunity to illuminate contemporary artists who uphold Surrealist tenets and explore invisible dream worlds, the uncanny and the occult in their works.
Among them, David Alabo and Portia Zvavahera are at the forefront of Afro-Surrealism. Ghanaian Moroccan artist David Alabo uses Surrealist sleek compositions to celebrate Afro-Futurism as a site of narrative speculation steeped in digital culture. A winged silhouette rides a whale. Elegiac fossilized animals suggest a post-human fate. Disembodied robot-meet-mannequin characters occupy deserts alongside spheres and vanitas craniums. “Afro-Surrealism focuses on augmentation, on overcoming the many struggles that define our history and assuming the agency of our narrative. It calls on us to ask what freedom for Black people will look like in the future,” Alabo, who champions new media and commercial projects, said in an interview concerning his artistic lineage.
More expressionistic, Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera—also included in the 2022 Venice Biennial—infuses her works with strong pictorial quality. Her paintings are self-contained worlds in which characters become suspended icons protected by fetal-like pigmented envelopes—they nest, die, regenerate. Dreams play a significant role for Zvavahera in exploring hidden dimensions, spiritual revelations and a cornucopia of creatures, many of which radiate in intensely nocturnal plum and wine hues.
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In Sara Anstis’ feminist take on Surrealism, the nude is elevated as a return to a primordial essence. Her female nudes strip specific markers of time and place. From their no-place, women often break the fourth wall to directly gaze at the viewer. Clouds have faces and animals playfully engage with the characters. In these single-image glimpses, her paintings often exude tarot-like potency. For example, The Itinerant Mourner (2022), which was presented during her first New York City solo show at Kasmin, depicts a naked woman wandering in the lavender night. She holds a staff with blooming twigs; a dog is perched on her crouching back. Tiptoeing in darkness, she’s as much a seeker of truth and light as a mourner. Her sight is set forward, ahead, above danger and hardships. In The Island (2023), Anstis paints a sapphic scene of two naked women on a beach, with octopi latching onto their bodies. A storm is brewing. The Venetian blond characters recall Botticelli’s rendering of the goddess of love Venus, but Anstis’ added eeriness suggests a new terrain of mythology where strangeness, pastoral love and looming violence coexist in dream memories.
In her show at San Francisco’s gallery Wendi Norris, “Tiger in the Looking Glass,” which opens September 13, Brooklyn-based painter Chitra Ganesh experiments with oneiric jungle scenes, whereby night conjures day. Images of characters in lush rainforests contrast with the minimalist line work underpinning the more dreamlike visions dominated by deep blues, purples and charcoal.
“A vital aspect of surrealism’s legacy that I have always been drawn to is how this movement centers on contemplating the link between psychic and political liberation,” Ganesh told Observer, citing concerns such as climate justice and the rise of authoritarianism. “Surrealism’s impulse to render the familiar strange, contingent, or even untenable resonates more than ever, a hundred years on,” she added, explaining how her own practice draws on surrealist techniques such as collage and “automatic writing.”
Myths are powerful connectors of history, culture and people. Surrealism’s infatuation with cosmological and mystical themes echoes in the works of Mumbai-born Rithika Merchant. Her cohesive series re-enchants the realm of knowledge and perception with mesmerizing frescos that interrogate the depths of our senses and intuition, such as her most recent Terraformation (2022-2023), Festival of the Phoenix Sun (2021-2022) and Return to Stardust (2021). Merchant embraces duality, whether in evocations of black and white accents reminiscent of Hilma af Klint’s dichotomous works or through characters who channel primeval masculine and feminine energy. Parahuman and animal worlds mingle—birds are regular features—in addition to nods towards ancient divinities which are recognized in anthropomorphic attributes and masks. These include traits suggesting ibises and falcons, species that were associated with ancient Egyptian gods (Thoth and Horus, respectively). Amid lunar cycles, watchful eyes, serpents, trees of life, volcanoes and more, Merchant explores a collective unconsciousness connecting the divine with a sensitivity toward symbolic storytelling. Influenced by collage, her complex compositions encompass geometrical as well as looser components that together carry a strong visual identity.
“Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?” Breton had asked. When does a dream end and reality emerge, one may want to similarly ask. With Surrealism continuing to question our sleeping and waking states, these two notions often blur. In that space, infinite creativity emerges.