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Surrealism has been a significant artistic movement worldwide for over 60 years. The exhibition at Tate Modern in London will showcase some of its best works, from “Lobster Telephone” by Salvador Dali to the enormous “Long Distance” painting by Ted Joan.
The exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders” is a unique display of over 150 artworks launched on Thursday. The pieces span from paintings and sculpture to photography or film.
The painting “Time Transfixed” by Rene Magritte is a masterpiece of a train getting through a fireplace. It’s on display with another piece from Joan: the 36-foot long drawing “Long Distance.” Joan took almost 30 years to finish this work and contains artists worldwide.
The paintings on the exhibit range from Picasso’s “The Three Dancers” to an untitled painting by Malangatana Ngwenya (which features people struggling for their freedom in Mozambique), and Yamashita Kikuji’s Japanese work of art called “Deification of a Soldier,” which depicts the 20th-century movement’s geographic attainment.
“As you walk through these galleries, you can see artists from Cairo, from Seoul, from Haiti, from London, from Paris, from Prague and beyond,” said Director of Tate Modern Frances Morris in an interview.
“What the show depicts is a kind of ecosystem of contact and tentacles linking artists (through) friendships and belief systems and by their absolute commitment to freedom. Freedom of expression and freedom from constraint … It feels very now.”
The exhibit also features artworks by Lee Miller, an American model and war photographer who worked in Cairo during the late 1930s. She took two photos for this residency: “Portrait of Space” and “The Cloud Factory.”
“It’s very emblematic of her wanting to escape and her sense of adventure and how you see things in different ways when you’re a surrealist,” said Miller’s granddaughter and co-director of the Lee Miller archives, Ami Bouhassane of “Portrait of Space.”
“I mean, this is just the broken fly screen on the window of the doorway in the rest house, in the middle of the western desert. But she … noticed it and set up the shot.”
“The Last Voyage of Captain Cook,” a sculpture by Miller’s second husband, Roland Penrose, is also displayed at the exhibition.
“Surrealism Beyond Borders” runs from February 24 until August 29.
