Category: surrealism

Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington, “Queria ser Pájaro (I Wanted to be a Bird)”, 1960

Leonora Carrington was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter and novelist. Expelled from two schools for her rebellious nature, her family sent her to Mrs Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. In 1927, at the age of ten, she had her first contact with Surrealism, meeting French poet and one of the founders of the movement Paul Éluard. In 1935, Carrington attended the Chelsea School of Art in London for one year, and then transferred to the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts which was established by the modernist painter Amédée Ozenfant.

Leonora Carrington, attracted to Max Ernst’s paintings at the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, later met Ernnst in 1937 when they bonded and eventually settled in southern France. They supported and coroborated on each other’s artistic endeavors. In 1939, Carrington painted her 1937-1938 “Self Portrait / The Inn of the Dawn Horse”, a dream-like scene with her perched on the edge of a chair facing a hyena with her back to a flying rocking horse. Later in 1939, she painted the “Portrait of Max Ernst”, a surrealist winter scene with Ernst wearing a mauve, feathery coat standing in front of a frozen horse.

Ernst, considered a degenerate artist and arrested by  the Nazis, fled to New York with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, who he later married in 1941. Carrington, devastated and having fled to Spain, suffered from a nervous breakdown. She was treeted with powerful drugs, fled from the asylum and sought shelter in the Mexican Embassy. Carrington was helped by Renato Leduc, the Mexican ambassador, who ageed to a marriage of convenience, and took her away to Mexico. After a divorce, she stayed in Mexico, creating a mural named “El Mundo Magico de los Mayas”, influenced by native folk stories. The mural is now residing in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City.

Leonora Carrington was one of the last surviving participants of the Surrealist Movement of the 1930s. She focused on magical realism and alchemy in her artwork and used autobiographical detail and symbolism in her paintings. Carrington was not interested in the writings of Sigmund Freud, as was other participants of surrealism. Carrington was also a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s. She designed “Mujeres Conciencia / Women’s Awareness” in 1973, a poster to the Women’ Liberation Movement, depicting a surrealist new Eve. She understood that psychic freedom and political freedom were both neccessary for women’s emancipation.

 

Edgar Ende

Edgar Ende, “Am Ufer” (On Shore), Oil on Canvas, Date Unknown

Edgar Karl Alfons Ende was a German surrealist painter and father of the children’s novelist Michael Emde.

Edgar Ende attended the Altona School of Arts and Crafts from 1916 to 1920.  In the 1930′s, Ende’s Surrealist paintings began to attract considerable critical attention, but were then condemned as degenerate by the German Nazi government. Beginning in 1936 the Nazis forbade him to continue to paint or exhibit his work. In 1940 he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe as an operator of anti-aircraft artillery.

The majority of his paintings were destroyed by a bomb raid on Munich in 1944, making his surviving pre-war work extremely rare. In 1951, Ende met the recognized founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton, who admired his work and declared him an official Surrealist. He continued to paint surrealist works until his death in 1965 of a myocardial infarction.

Ende’s paintings are thought to have had a significant influence on his son Michael’s writing. This is inferred in the scenes depicting the surreal dream-paintings from Yor’s Minroud in “Die Unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story)”, and is made explicit in Michael Ende’s book “Der Spiegel im Spiegel (The Mirror in the Mirror)”, a collection of short stories based on Edgar Ende’s surrealist works.

Second Insert Image: Edgar Ende, “Das Relief auf dem Felsen (The Relief on the Rock)”, 1936, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 90.5 cm, Private Collection

André Masson

André Masson, “Returning from the Execution”, 1937, Oil on Canvas

André Masson was born on January 4, 1896, in Balagny-sur-Oise, France. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Masson settled in Paris in 1920. Two years later he met D.-H. Kahnweiler, who served as his principal dealer until 1931. His first one-man show was held at Kahnweiler’s Galerie Simon in Paris in 1924. That same year Masson met André Breton and joined the Surrealist group, with which he was initially affiliated until 1928.

During his first Surrealist period, Masson made automatic drawings and paintings and experimented with sand paintings. At this time be began to explore violent and erotic themes and was influenced by Analytical Cubism. He illustrated books and his works were reproduced regularly in the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste. In 1925 he participated in the first Surrealist exhibition, at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. Two years later he met Giacometti and executed his first sculpture.

Leonora Carrington

Sculptures by Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington established herself as both a key figure in the Surrealist movement and an artist of remarkable individuality. Her biography is colorful, including a romance with the older artist Max Ernst, an escape from the Nazis during World War II, mental illness, and expatriate life in Mexico.

In her art, her dreamlike, often highly detailed compositions of fantastical creatures in otherworldly settings are based on an intensely personal symbolism. The artist herself preferred not to explain this private visual language to others. However, themes of metamorphosis and magic, as well as frequent whimsy, have given her art an enduring appeal

Carrington shared the Surrealists’ keen interest in the unconscious mind and dream imagery. To these ideas she added her own unique blend of cultural influences, including Celtic literature, Renaissance painting, Central American folk art, medieval alchemy, and Jungian psychology.

“I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”- Leonora Carrington

Joel Rea

Paintings by Joel Rea

Joel Rea was born in 1983 and graduated from the Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2003. He has exhibited his paintings through out Australia for the last 13 years featuring also in notable overseas exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia. Rea has been acclaimed for his oil paintings in many prestigious art awards held across Australia including most recently the Fleurieu Landscape Prize, The Mosman Art Award, The Sulman Prize and the 2016 Moran Prize for Portraiture.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst, “Naissance d’une Galaxie (Birth of a Galaxy)”, Oil on Canvas, 1969, Beyeler Foundation, Riehen, Switzerland

Closely associated with Surrealism and Dada, Max Ernst made paintings, sculptures, and prints depicting fantastic, nightmarish images that often made reference to anxieties originating in childhood. Ernst demonstrated a profound interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, which is apparent in his exploration of Automatism and his invention of the Frottage technique.

The artist’s psychoanalytic leanings are evident in his iconic 1923 work “Pietà”, or “Revolution by Night”, in which Ernst substitutes the image of Mary cradling the body of Christ with a depiction of the artist himself held by his father. Much of the artist’s work defied societal norms, Christian morality, and the aesthetic standards of Western academic art.

Max Ernst painted “Birth of a Galaxy” in Paris during his second French period.

Roland Rafael Repczuk

Roland Rafael Repczuk, Title Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 1999

Roland Rafael Repczuk is a surrealistic painter from Hanerau-Hademarschen, Germany. He mixes his own oil paints out of light-fast pigments. He also does mosaic panels of Venetian glass pieces.

Roland Rafael Repczuk was born in 1963 in Kassel, a city located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. He relocated, with his family, to Euskirchen, a seven-hundred year old city close to Cologne, Germany. Influenced by the artwork of german painter and sculptor Joseph Beuys and American craftsman Gustav Bereur, Repczuk decided to pursue an art career. 

Roland Repczuk exhibited his first works at an action art exhibition held in July of 1980 in Carqueiranne, located in southeastern France. This was followed by several exhibitions in the city of Euskirchen in 1981. After extensive traveling through Europe, Repczuk moved to the south of France and changed his style in 1985 from contemporary modern to a more tradition craft. Since then, he has had many exhibitions of his work in Germany and throughout Europe.

Using the techniques of the old master painters, Roland Repczuk creates realistic oil paintings of a surrealistic nature. At the end of 1990, he moved back to Germany with his family, settling in Hamburg and continued producing his paintings, mosaics and frescoes.

Ilene Meyer

The Surreal Artwork of Ilene Meyer

Ilene Meyer (1938-2009) was a self-trained oil painter whose work combines realism, fantasy, surrealism, and psychedelic colours and patterns. Her art was used on the cover of books by science fiction writers, including Philip K Dick.

She was a painter who created stunning magic realist, fantastic and visionary works, often involving continued themes of checkered planes, geometric objects, animals, sea creatures, flowers, fruit and other aspects of the natural world, real and imagined, swirled into cascades of looping forms as if pulled by strands of liquified gravity.

Ilene Meyer played with the influence of other artists and various genres in her paintings. She wore her fondness for the work of Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí on her sleeve, making playful homages to many of his themes, particularly from his later “Atomic” period. She became internationally recognized, and her work is exceptionally popular in Japan.

Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam, “The Hurricane”, Oil on Jute, 1945, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Le Habana, Cuba

Wifredo Lam was Cuban painter known for his synthesis of Modernist aesthetics and Afro-Cuban imagery. Lam was born to a Chinese immigrant father and a mother of African and Spanish descent. He left the small town of Sagua la Grande for Havana in 1916, where he initially studied law.

By 1918 he had begun to study art at Havana’s School of Fine Arts, and he soon began to exhibit in annual salons. He went to Spain in 1923 and briefly studied academic painting in Madrid. In 1936 and 1937 he fought for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, fleeing Barcelona for Paris in 1938 with a letter of introduction to Pablo Picasso.

Through Picasso Lam met members of the Parisian avant-garde, and he began to experiment with various Modernist styles. Two Nudes, I (1937), for example, resembles Henri Matisse’s work in its heavily outlined and rounded forms. Other works, such as Composition (1940), utilize Cubism techniques. After meeting André Breton, Lam became an active member of the Surrealist movement.

Surrealism’s involvement with myth, the subconscious, automatism, and, in particular, non-Western art was critical to the development of his work. African art enjoyed a vogue in Paris in the 1930s, particularly among the Surrealists, and its influence on Lam’s work of this period is evident.