More than 100 works by Magritte travel to Australia for major retrospective
Sydney is stepping into its summer months with a bowler hat, an apple and a pipe in tow. This Saturday, the Art Gallery of New South Wales opens Magritte, the first major retrospective of the Belgian surrealist painter in Australia.
Exactly a century after French writer André Breton published his Manifeste du Surréalisme in Paris, a text that laid the intellectual foundation for Surrealism, Australians are bringing René Magritte’s unique world to their country.
Charly Hersovici, presidentof the Magritte Foundation, anticipates a substantial audience for the show, estimating “300,000 to 500,000 visitors. At a press conference on Friday, Hersovici highlighted the artist's universal appeal: “Magritte speaks to everyone, in all languages. He is understood and appreciated by everyone, of every generation, from the United States to Korea to Japan.”'
The exhibition will feature iconic works such as L'Empire des Lumières, Golconde and Les Amants. Hersovicidescribes it as “a huge exhibition dedicated to the artist's oeuvre, a retrospective of canvases, gouaches, drawings, and objects”.
© BELGA VIDEO MARIE-PAULINE DESSET
Around 100 paintings are being exhibited in Sydney for the first time, with contributions from institutions and private collections. Several pieces come from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Additional contributors include the Menil Collection in Houston, US, which holds the largest catalogue of Magritte works outside Europe.
The retrospective “will take visitors through four decades of the artist's work: from his early avant-garde explorations and commercial successes in the 1920s to his enormous contribution to Surrealism, with his provocative works in the 1940s and his critically acclaimed paintings of the latter years,” said Michael Brand, director of the Art Gallery of NSW.
Visitors “will encounter works that underline Magritte's profound influence on contemporary and modern art, while discovering lesser-known aspects of his practice, which reveal his sense of humour and independence.”
The exhibition runs from 26 October to 9 February.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia © BELGA PHOTO MARIE-PAULINE DESSET
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