Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity

June 10 2024

Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity is a joint exhibition project between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Museum Barberini. It is the first large-scale international loan exhibition that looks at the movement’s interest in magic and the occult. Presenting about 60 works, in the Venetian venue, from over 40 international museums and private collections, it offers a rich overview of the entire development of the Surrealist movement, exploring the myriad ways, in which magic and the occult informed its artistic trajectory, 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.

In their works, Surrealist artists frequently drew on occult symbolism and cultivated the traditional image of the artist’s persona as a magician, seer, and alchemist, looking to magic as a poetic and deeply philosophical discourse, related to individual self-empowerment.

The exhibition includes works by Victor Brauner, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Maya Deren, Óscar Domínguez, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, René Magritte, Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo, among the others. Among the national and international lenders are the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, The Menil Collection in Houston, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rivoli-Torino.

 Go to the official website