Category: surrealism

Surrealism in Photography: Ten Black and White Images

Surrealism in Photography: Ten Black and White Images

Surrealism was officially launched as a movement with the publication of poet André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. The Surrealists did not rely on reasoned analysis or sober calculation; on the contrary, they saw the forces of reason blocking the access routes to the imagination. Their efforts to tap the creative powers of the unconscious set Breton and his companions on a path that carried them through the territory of dreams, intoxication, chance, sexual ecstasy, and madness. The images obtained by such means, whether visual or literary, were prized precisely to the degree that they captured these moments of psychic intensity in provocative forms of unrestrained, convulsive beauty.

Photography came to occupy a central role in Surrealist activity. In the works of Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, the use of such procedures as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality. Other photographers used techniques such as rotation or distortion to render their images uncanny. Hans Bellmer obsessively photographed the mechanical dolls he fabricated himself, creating strangely sexualized images, while the painter René Magritte used the camera to create photographic equivalents of his paintings.

Michal Karcz

Digital Photography by Michal Karcz

Some artists get to the point when their usual medium or technique starts to limit their visions. This is exactly what happened to a Polish artist Michal Karcz who found that painting and the ordinary dark room photography techniques didn’t allow him to fully realize his potential.

Born in 1977 in Warsaw, the graduate of the High School of the Arts was first passionate about painting. However, in the early 90’s, he became drawn to photography only to realize that the dark-room techniques alone were almost as limiting as the paintbrush and canvas. Luckily, the developing technology allowed him to combine the two with the help of some digital tools.

“This digital photography and software gave me the opportunity to generate unique realities that are impossible to create with ordinary dark room techniques.” – Michal Karcz

Henrik Arrested Uldalen

Paintings by Henrik Arrested Uldalen

The Norwegian artist Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen combines the skills of a classical figurative painter with a contemporary approach. His work depicts people in dream-like states of floating or swimming, peacefully engaged in their inner thoughts. His realistic approach captures the human form with a surreal atmosphere, reflecting the tranquility that his models are experimenting. His work does not intend to capture photographic realism but rather an emotional realism that conveys the moment of floating in nothingness.

Zdzislaw Beksinski

Illustrations by Zdzislaw Beksinski

Zdzislaw Beksiński  was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor, specializing in the field of dystopian surrealism. Beksiński did his paintings and drawings in what he called either a ‘Baroque’ or a ‘Gothic’ manner. His creations were made mainly in two periods. The first period of work is generally considered to contain expressionistic color, with a strong style of “utopian realism” and surreal architecture, like a doomsday scenario. The second period contained more abstract style, with the main features of formalism.

Beksiński threw himself into painting with a passion, and worked constantly (always to the strains of classical music). He soon became the leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his “fantastic period”, which lasted up to the mid-1980s. This is his best-known period, during which he created very disturbing images, showing a surrealistic, post-apocalyptic environment with very detailed scenes of death, decay, landscapes filled with skeletons, deformed figures and deserts.

On 21 February 2005, Beksiński was found dead in his flat in Warsaw with 17 stab wounds on his body; two of the wounds were determined to have been fatal. Robert Kupiec (the teenage son of his longtime caretaker), who later pleaded guilty, and his accomplice, Lukas Kupiec, were arrested shortly after the crime. Before his death, Beksiński refused to loan Robert Kupiec a few hundred złotych (approximately $100).

Erik Johansson

Surreal Photography by Erik Johansson

Erik Johansson, originally from Sweden, claims to capture ‘ideas’ in his work. Whether using photographs and digital editing, or even paint and hand made cardboard models to re-create an imagined vision, his completed images look as though they are perfectly genuine photographs.
In fact, every new image is a combination of hundreds of original photographs, sometimes with raw materials created by Mr Johansson himself, and dozens of hours spent in Adobe Photoshop to digitally alter and combine different elements to illustrate his idea.
Mr Johansson writes on his website that he uses photography as a means of ‘collecting material to realise the ideas in my mind’.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Six Paintings by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, of Coast Salish descent, graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in British Columbia. In combining his own experiences with a political perspective, he paints landscapes with vivid, acidic colours, merging Native iconography with a surrealist influence to address West Coast Native issues.

Yuxweluptun is Salish for “man of many masks,” a name given to the artist during his initiation into the Sxwaixwe Society at the age of fourteen. It is Cowishan Salish belief that the Sxwaixwe is a supernatural being who came down from the sky to live at the bottom of a lake. There is a dance associated with this creature in which the mask plays an important role. Yuxweluptun explains, “You carry the mask that belongs to your family and you identify with the animal on the mask.” (Robin Laurence, “Man of Masks,” Canadian Art, Spring 1995).

Yuxweluptun has chosen art as a way to voice his political concerns, exposing environmental destruction and the struggle of Native people. He believes that his artwork stimulates dialogue between Native and non-Native people.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

 

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, Young Man with Death, 1908

Born in Lund, Sweden, in April of 1884, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, known as GAN, was an artist working in both oils and watercolors, and writer of poetry and short stories. He is regarded as a founding member of the Modernist art movement in Sweden.

For his early education, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson attended a Technical Company School; he later studied at Danish historical painter Kristian Zahrtmann’s School in Copenhagen. In 1907, he entered his work in an exhibition held at the Art Museum of the University of Lund.  Adrian-Nilsson traveled to Berlin in 1913 where through author and critic Herwarth Walden’s gallery, Der Sturm, he came in contact with the contemporary art movements.

Both Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc were of huge importance when Adrian-Nilsson began developing his own style of expressive cubism, a semi-abstract style with deep, vibrant colors. Adrian-Nilsson became very influential in the radical art movement and was a member of the Halmstadgruppen, a group of avant-garde artists at Hamstad, Sweden, which continued unchanged until 1979. This group eventually included painter and sculptor Alexander Archipenko, painter and graphic artist Erik Olson, Sven Jonson, and Esaias Thorén. Initially cubists, the group was influenced later by Adrian-Nilsson’s surrealistic phase and his motifs of seamen.

Adrian-Nilsson was fascinated by modern technology and masculine strength, which was reflected in his images of sailors and sportsmen . Works of this nature include the 1914-15 “Katarinahissen I”, depicting two sailors amid a cubist blue-toned landscape, and “Sjömän i Gröna Lunds tivoli II”, a surrealistic work in blues and browns depicting sailors in Gröna Lund’s amusement park. Living a hidden life at a time that gay eroticism was both taboo and illegal in Sweden, Adrian-Nilsson expressed himself through these cubist and surreal images. 

By 1919, Adrian-Nilsson’s art was developing into pure abstraction. He lived in Paris between the years 1920 and 1925, during which time he met Alexander Archipenko and Fernand Léger whose influence can be seen in Adrian-Nilsson’s renderings of mechanically-styled sportsmen, seamen and soldiers. In the later part of the 1920s, Adrian-Nilsson was working in his geometric abstract period. He developed his own personal style of surrealism during the 1930s and exhibited his work in multiple  exhibitions, including the 1935 Kubisme-Surrealisme exhibition in Copenhagen.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson died in Stockholm on March 29, 1965 and is buried at the cemetery of Norra Kyrkogården in Lund.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson’s work is represented at the Nationalmuseum and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg’s Art Museum, the Malmö Art Museum, and the Museum of Culture in Lund where his work constitutes a permanent exhibition of modernistic art. Adrian-Nilsson’s writings are preserved at the University Library of Lund.

Giorgio de Chico

Oil Paintings by Giorgio de Chico

Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. After 1919, he became interested in traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work.

De Chirico won praise for his work almost immediately from the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, who helped to introduce his work to the later Surrealists. De Chirico strongly influenced the Surrealist movement: Yves Tanguy wrote how one day in 1922 he saw one of De Chirico’s paintings in an art dealer’s window, and was so impressed by it he resolved on the spot to become an artist—although he had never even held a brush. Other Surrealists who acknowledged De Chirico’s influence include Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte.

Christian Schloe

Digital Artwork by Christian Schloe

These surreal scenes by Christian Schloe feature bizarre moments that draw viewers out of a concrete reality and into a dreamy, fictional world. In his work, the digital artist creates expressive visual stories filled with soft color palettes, elegant birds and butterflies, soft flower petals, and otherworldly, majestic landscapes. The illusion of a scratched canvas and worn, aged edges allude to a different time and place where a howling wolf is half human, half animal; a couple dances among the clouds; and a young girl collects drops of moonlight in a bowl.

Each beautifully designed composition is a whimsical fantasy concocted by the talented artist. Schloe playfully blends realistic elements with perplexing, conceptual ideas. In doing so, he creates the illusion of serenity within a strange and confusing composition. Though he may have significant meaning behind his work, the artist leaves no clues to an explanation. Viewers are left to venture out on our own journey, interpreting the intriguing illustrations with endless possibilities to the narratives that we might dream up.

Hannah Faith Yata

Hannah Faith Yata, “Caustic”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 86.4 x 111.8 cm, Private Collection

Born in Douglasville, Georgia in March of 1989, Hannah Faith Yata is an American artist of Japanese-American descent, whose realist works are fashioned through techniques and materials employed by the historic Masters of Europe’s artist guilds. Her surrealist, often psychedelic, large-scale works depict the energy and beauty of nature, but also relay a sense of unease as they examine threats of moral injustice and environment degradation.

Hannah Faith Yata spent her early childhood in a small rural town where, home schooled, she developed a deep love of nature and animals. She studied at the Franklin College of Arts and Science in Athens, Georgia, and at the University of Georgia where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting. After her studies in psychology, feminism, and art, Yata made the decision to relocate in 2012 to New York where she could focus on her work as a full-time painter.

Some of the prominent themes featured in Yata’s work are the origins of religion, the nature of the universe, and the symbolic significance of the feminine archetype in our consciousness. Fascinated with different cultures and tribal iconography, she  often employs masks in her paintings to differentiate emotions and characters, as well as, to create a link between nature and humanity. Yata’s elaborate dreamscapes contained multiple layers of symbolism dealing with society and the world which surrounds us. 

In 2015, Hannah Faith Yata was commissioned to produce several works of art for musician Bobby Ray Simmons Jr, popularly known as B.o.B. These paintings were featured on his album “Psycadelik Thoughtz” and those in his “Elements” series. Yata married fellow artist Jean Pierre Arboleda in 2016; both artists call attention to the impact of industry upon nature. In 2019, both artists had a dual-solo exhibition entitled “No Man’s Land” at New York City’s Booth & Last Rites Gallery; this show celebrated the mythology of a whole and unspoiled world. 

Yata’s initial solo exhibition was “Dancing in Delirium” held at the Corey Helford Gallery, one of the premier galleries for contemporary art in Los Angeles, California. In this show, she called upon the symbolism of the female figure, often combining it with parts of animals to create metaphorical hybrid characters. In April of 2018, Yata had a solo show, entitled “Exile” at the Phaneros Gallery in Nevada City, California. This exhibition focused on the mythos of the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the sacred garden. 

Hannah Faith Yats’s 2021 “Daughters at the Edge of the Garden” was held at the Allouche Gallery in New York City. The work of this retrospective, deeply inspired by Paleolithic and Neolithic art, were paintings woven with motifs and symbols to celebrate nature’s cycles and pagan imagery which has been demonized by society. In March of 2023, Yata was again at the Allouche Gallery with her “The Alchemy and the Ecstacy”, paintings and dreamscapes which harmonized the human body, its rituals and its growth with all other living beings. Using myths and alchemical symbols, she portrayed the transformation of the soul through its metamorphosis in light and darkness.

Hannah Faith Yata and Jean Pierre Arboleda currently live and work in Pennsylvania; each has a considerable influence on the other’s work. Although each has their own work components, they both share a reverence and respect for the natural world. 

Note: Hannah Faith Yata’s website contains images, exhibition information, as well as available limited edition giclée prints. Her site is located at: https://hannahyata.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hannah Faith Yata”, 2017, Color Print, Bein Art Gallery, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia

Second Insert Image: Hannah Faith Yata, “Holy Ghost”, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 101.6 x 213.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hannah Faith Yata, “Monarch”, 2013, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 61 cm, Private Collection 

Max Ernst

Max Ernst, “Euclid”, 1945, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 57.5 cm, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

In Max Ernst’s 1945 “Euclid”, a surrealist portrait of the ancient Geometer is presented in abstract form with the figure’s head rendered as a geometric solid, resembling a pyramid. The wise man is clad in noble, velvet clothes, rendered using the decalcomania technique, and adorned with two white roses. He is surrounded by a geometric background of overlapping planes, intersecting straight lines and rhodonea – like curves, some of which extend over its face, contributing to the formation of its features. His owl – like eyes, formed on an inverted antefix with the design of the ancient Greek anthemion ornament, glow bright yellow betraying intense intellectual activity.

Kelly Fearing

Six Etchings by Kelly Fearing

Kelly Fearing was one of the first Texas painters to reject the bluebonnets, cowboys and secondhand Impressionism that had been the mainstays of the state’s artistic output since the end of the 19th century. Along with the other members of the Fort Worth Circle, Fearing introduced Texas to European Modernists like Picasso and Miró. He helped introduce the Texas population to abstraction, surrealism and cubism, all new forms of art not previously promoted in the area.

Even in the 1940s, Fearing lived as an openly gay man. Like the later work of gay artist David Hockney, Fearing’s subjects were often pretextual reasons to introduce the subject of homoeroticism into the contemporary art world. One example of this is his 1950 “Male Bather”, an emerging, transitional work influenced by the work of Paul Klee, which exemplifies tthe  theme used by many artists of the time.

In a 2000 interview, Fearing said in reply to a question about the Fort Worth Circle: “We were considered way out at the time. But we were just doing what we liked.” This individualism made Fearing into one of Texas’ most important Modernists.

Roberto Matta

 

Paintings and Pastels by Roberto Matta

Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (November 11, 1911 – November 23, 2002), better known as Roberto Matta, was one of Chile’s best-known painters and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art.

Matta’s travels in Europe and the USA led him to meet artists such as Arshile Gorky, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, and Le Corbusier. It was Breton who provided the major spur to the Chilean’s direction in art, encouraging his work and introducing him to the leading members of the Paris Surrealist movement. Matta produced illustrations and articles for Surrealist journals such as Minotaure. During this period he was introduced to the work of many prominent contemporary European artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.