Francisca Vandepitte, Didier Ottinger, Marie Sarré, Paolo Scopelliti

 

From Giorgio de Chirico to Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Dorothea Tanning, Man Ray and Leonor Fini: the exhibition and accompanying book offer an immersion in surrealist poetry, dream, the labyrinth, metamorphosis, the unknown and the subconscious, led by the great names of the surrealists. 

IMAGINE! explores surrealism from a symbolist perspective, through more than 130 works of art  (paintings, works on paper, sculptures, objects, assemblages, and photographs), focusing on the connections and similarities, and the differences between surrealism and symbolism, one of its precursors. 

 

From 1880 onwards, Brussels was an exceptional hub for the arts and the avant-garde, as demonstrated by the exhibitions of groups such as “Les XX” and “La Libre Esthétique”. Symbolism, embodied in particular by Rops, Spilliaert, Khnopff, Delville and Minne, evolved rapidly in Brussels and largely anticipated the emergence of the surrealist movement. A few decades later, Brussels became a centre for Belgian surrealism. Despite the cultural rupture caused by World War I, the older symbolists and the emerging youth were never fundamentally alienated from each other.

After Brussels, the exhibition will travel to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Fundación Mapfré Madrid, before closing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.