22 October, 2022 – 29 January, 2023

The exhibition Surrealism and Magic. Enchanted Modernity is the first large-scale international loan exhibition to focus on the Surrealists’ interest in magic, myth, and the occult.

At the center of the Surrealist enterprise lay a reorientation towards the world of the night-dream, the unconscious and the irrational. Numerous artists, who moved in the intellectual orbit of the movement, also immersed themselves in the imaginative world of magic. In their works, they frequently drew on occult symbolism and cultivated the traditional image of the artist’s persona as a magician, seer, and alchemist. Chronologically, the exhibition ranges from the “metaphysical painting” of Giorgio de Chirico around 1915, through Max Ernst’s iconic painting Attirement of the Bride (1940), to the occult imagery that underpinned the late works of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.

Overall, the show includes some 90 works by more than 20 artists, among them Victor Brauner, Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Roberto Matta, Roland Penrose, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. Among the more than 40 international lenders are the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, the Museo nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels as well as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

An exhibition of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, curated by Daniel Zamani (Potsdam) and Grazina Subelyte (Venice). 

All artworks © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022