Taipei: An exhibition tracing the surrealism movement and its development over the past 100 years is set to open in Taipei on Saturday.
According to Focus Taiwan, the exhibition, titled “Surrealism: Worlds in Dialogue,” at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, will run until Aug. 30, and is the third stop on an international tour, following shows in Germany and Finland, museum director Loh Li-chen said at a press conference Friday. It features more than 120 works by nearly 60 internationally renowned artists and filmmakers, including Ren© Magritte and David Lynch, with exhibits ranging from paintings, sculptures, and photographs to films.
Among the works are pieces not previously shown in Germany and Finland, such as “I Shop Therefore I Am” by American artist Barbara Kruger, Loh stated. She expressed hope that visitors will set aside past understandings and re-engage with familiar concepts at the intersection of dream and reality, potentially discovering new perspectives.
The exhibition was launched in Germany in 2024 to mark the centennial of the “Manifesto of Surrealism” by French writer Andr© Breton, according to the museum’s press statement. Mainly inspired by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and emerging in the wake of World War I, surrealism refers to a global cultural movement in which artists questioned existing social norms and traditional rational thought.
Curator Maximilian Letze noted the widespread presence of first-generation surrealists’ works in popular culture, such as on tote bags, cellphone cases, films, and The Simpsons, which has led to their ubiquity. One of the exhibition’s goals is to let visitors rediscover the radical nature of these works and their contemporary relevance by placing first-generation artworks in dialogue with those of later generations, he explained.
Letze also mentioned that recent scholarship has illuminated the roles of women and female surrealists within art historical discourse, and the exhibition aims to highlight these contributions to present a more balanced picture of the movement.