Surreal Worlds

The artists of these ‘surreal worlds’ draw from the unconscious. Based upon visions, dreams and nightmares, their works disturb the viewer’s perception, shattering the certainty of his existence.

In the series of Carceri from 1760 Giovanni Battista Piranesi renders his prison architecture tangible to us. The buildings do not appear awesome because of the instruments of torture but rather because of the confusing spaces and peculiar perspectives: the numerous stairs lead to nowhere. Francisco de Goya on the other hand reveals the fears and weaknesses of mankind by transforming them into demons and monsters or into animals. The dense masses are depicted as an elephant (Animal folly, c. 1815-24), the doctor as a donkey. Hybrids are also to be seen in the works of Charles Meryon - usually they are located in the sky, sometimes, however, they are shown to be advancing toward the city and its population (The Vampire, 1853).

The remote dream world of Odilon Redon is not inhabited by monsters. In Homage to Goya (c. 1895) the isolated head of a young red-haired woman is suspended above a landscape which merges with the horizon. Gazing upwards, she appears to be making contact with another, spiritual world. In Alfred Kubin’s drawing The Sucker (c. 1903) we are again confronted with the red-haired woman. An elephant-like animal is sucking at her shoulder, while death is observing the scene. An intimate contact between a woman and an animal, which here may be viewed as explicitly sexual, also takes place in Henri Rousseau’s painting Beauty and the Beast (c. 1908). In the ‘surreal worlds’ it remains ambiguous whether the ‘beasts’ indeed represent a danger from the outside or whether they symbolize the forces of the instinct and man’s unconscious desires.

Paul Klee interprets life more in the sense of a Friendly Game (1933). He replaces the human figures by abstract forms which in union create a colorful checkered pattern. In comparison, Max Ernst’s visionary pictures (The Triumph of Love / False Allegory, 1937), often created by means of casting and other unusual techniques, seem sober. René Magritte’s works appear equally unreal - almost as if they were dramatically staged. Gaspard, The Nightwalker from 1965 plays upon the boundaries and the depth of the pictorial space. In The Red Cow (1943) Jean Dubuffet, who often experimented with materials such as sand or butterfly wings in his works, also transcends the given space. In his ‘surreal world’ the small peasant and his house are moved into the outermost corners; the true dimensions undergo an inversion.