Surrealism and Magic. Enchanted modernity – Museum Barberini | 22.10.2022–29.01.2023

On 22 October 2022, the Museum Barberini in Potsdam will launch the exhibition “Surrealism and Magic. Enchanted Modernism” with over 90 works of art from international lenders such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. With his Manifesto of Surrealism, published in October 1924, the French writer André Breton founded a literary and artistic movement that soon advanced to become the leading international avant-garde.

Image above: Victor Brauner, Der Surrealist, 1947

At the centre of surrealism was the turn to the world of the dream, the unconscious and the irrational. The artists immersed themselves in the realm of ideas of magic. In their works, they drew on occult symbols and staged themselves as magicians, seers and alchemists.

“Surrealism and Magic. Enchanted Modernism” is the first comprehensive exhibition to focus on the Surrealists’ interest in magic, myth and the occult. It spans the arc from Giorgio de Chirico’s “metaphysical painting” around 1915 to Max Ernst’s iconic painting The Dressing of the Bride (1940) and the occult imagery in the late work of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.

On display are over 90 works by around 20 artists, including key works by Victor Brauner, Paul Delvaux, Leonor Fini, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy and Dorothea Tanning.

The more than 30 international lenders include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, the Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. An exhibition of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

WHEN?

Saturday, 22. October 2022 until Sunday, 29. January 2023

WHERE?

Museum Barberini
Humboldtstr. 5–6
14467 Potsdam