Surrealism: 7 exhibitions to dive into the art movement

From Paris to New York, from Man Ray to Val Telberg: Surrealism on the other side of the Atlantic

While the works of Man Ray (1890-1976) are currently gracing the walls of the Centre Pompidou, Les Douches Gallery is also exhibiting the treasures made by the Franco-American artist: seven tapestries created in 1973 by Frédérique Bachellerie and Peter Schönwald, inspired by the series of paper collages Revolving Doors he made between 1916 and 1917, at his debut as an artist in the United States. Published a few years later in a variety of Surrealist magazines, their lithographic versions influenced many artists of the new movement at the time and foreshadowed, through the superimposition of abstract forms, the photographic experiments that Man Ray began in the 1920s.

These black-and-white snapshots made his name, and are echoed today in the work of American surrealist artist Val Telberg (1910-1995), whose artworks are exhibited in the same Parisian gallery. Among collages of moving figures, floating silhouettes and visual hallucinations, all these visual concepts bring him closer to Man Ray and place Val Telberg as one of the most influential names of a movement that is too often centered around its great European figures.

The exhibitions “Revolving Doors. Seven tapestries by Man Ray” and ”Val Telberg. Un surréaliste américain à Paris”, open until November 10th, 2024, at Les Douches Gallery, 5 Rue Legouvé, Paris 10e.

The Minsky Gallery dedicates three exhibitions to Leonor Fini

Leonor Fini (1907-1996), a major figure of the Surrealist movement, has long been overshadowed by her male peers. Despite being featured in the movement’s most important exhibitions in the 1930s and 1940s, from Paris to London and New York, the Franco-Italian artist gained renewed popularity in recent decades, thanks to numerous galleries dedicating a series of retrospectives to her and the myriad texts and monographs that her Surrealist friends dedicated to her during her lifetime, like Jean Cocteau, Giorgio De Chirico, or Paul Eluard… Today, the Minsky Gallery is inaugurating a three-part exhibition as a tribute to Leonor Fini.

Presented like a retrospective of her work starting from the late 1920s to the 1090s, the first chapter unfolds a series of rarely exhibited artworks, including two emblematic ones: Femme en armure 2 (1938) and her Sphinx Self-portrait with Stanislao Lepri (1943). The exhibition is as rich as her paintings and includes some of the masks that Leonor Fini designed for the famous Parisian costume balls she used to organize in the second half of the 20th century…

The exhibition “Leonor Fini. Retrospective”, open until November 2nd, 2024, is the first part of a cycle of three exhibitions at the Minsky Gallery, 37 rue Vaneau, Paris 7e.

Three major female figures of Surrealism reunited at the Raphaël Durazzo Gallery

On the other side of the River Seine, the Raphaël Durazzo Gallery also presents the works of Leonor Fini, and more specifically, her intriguing erotic drawings, barely sketched with watercolor on delicate sheets of paper. On the same walls, kaleidoscopic landscapes by Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) stand next to sculptures made by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) at the end of her life and presented for the first time in France. Three great female names of Surrealism are brought together in an exhibition curated by the British specialist of Surrealism, Alyce Mahon.

Self-portraits, abstract nudes, mythological representations… The prolific imagination of these three artists opens up a new dimension in the exploration of Surrealism, emphasizing the impact the movement had in challenging the social and moral expectations placed upon women in the early 20th century. Above all, the presentation of their work also weaves a thread in the present, through the contemporary creations of Sara Anstis, Ginny Casey or Piper Bangs, who create artworks for this particular exhibition.

The exhibition “Le surréalisme au service de la distraction”, open until November 23rd, 2024 at the Raphaël Durazzo Gallery, 23 Rue du Cirque, Paris 8e.

The strange drawings of Max Ernst at the Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery

As a multidisciplinary artist, Max Ernst is the free spirit of the Surrealist movement. From monsters haunting his paintings to the use of different media, his work still fascinates and questions art history enthusiasts many decades later. Among the rich archives of the Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery – which will celebrate its centennial in 2025 – are some of his mysterious frottages (“rubbings”) and grattages (“scrapings”) published by the founder of the Parisian gallery in 1926.

Appearing as UFOs in the artist’s career, these graphite pencils rubbed on small sheets unfold a series of enigmatic images, including “Loplop”, Max Ernst’s alter ego bird. The inspiration for these tiny artworks? A childhood memory of the artist, haunted by the sleepy vision of a panel of faux mahogany in front of his bed and the optical illusions produced by the grooves of the wood. These illusions are to be found in the wavy striations of the artist’s pencil, as well as in the young Evi Keller’s blue canvases, which resonates with Max Ernst’s artworks in the gallery.

The exhibitions “Max Ernst. Histoire naturelle” and ”Origines. Evi Keller”, from September 21st, 2024, to January 18th, 2025, at the Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery, 5 rue de Saintonge, Paris 3e.

Jean-Claude Silbermann: a modern surrealist at the Sator Gallery

Born in 1935, Jean-Claude Silbermann was a late bloomer. Currently exhibited among other artists in the major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, the artist first immersed himself in poetry when he came of age and took part in numerous events organized by the Surrealist movement between 1956 and 1969. In the early 1960s, he then picked up a paintbrush and demonstrated the same boundless imagination displayed in his poems.

A perfect testimony of his mastery is his solo exhibition at the Sator Gallery, where his colorful canvases stand out against the immaculate walls using the technique of marouflage – affixing a painted canvas, intended as a mural, to a wall using an adhesive. From figures rushing into a green bush to the vision of strange characters from the back leaning on a mouse’s bed or facing a bucolic landscape on fire, the work of Jean-Claude Silbermann shapes a surrealist universe imbued with the codes of the mid-20th century, yet whose colors and themes are rooted in our early 21st-century reality. This major figure of the Surrealist movement will make room for the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, to whom the gallery will dedicate an exhibition in October.

The exhibition “L’attente et la raison ardente. Jean-Claude Silbermann”, open until October 5th, 2024, at the Sator Marais Gallery, 8 passage des Gravilliers, Paris 3e.

The Claude Cahun / Marcel Moore revisited at the Alberta Pane Gallery

Within the walls of the Alberta Pane Gallery, the creations of a singular, yet still relatively unknown Surrealist duo are unveiled: the artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and their muse and life partner Marcel Moore. Photography, books, collages, sculptures, performances… Claude Cahun’s artist expression takes shape through all the media that once were deer to them. A queer figure ahead of their time, they claimed a single, androgynous body without gender distinction through their art, thus anticipating the transformative themes of today’s society.

Reinvention of the iconography of the Adam Mystery, symbolic representation of the father figure, poetic self-portraits… With Marcel Moore, the artist conceived four-handed artworks and produced an artistic corpus that was unmatched at the time, in which photography plays a central role in questioning identity and the labels laid down by social norms.

The exhibition “Claude Cahun / Marcel Moore”, open until November 9th, 2024 at the Alberta Pane Gallery, 47 Rue de Montmorency, Paris 3e.

Three surrealist stories told at Le Minotaure Gallery

The Surrealists’ historic address, 2 rue des Beaux-Arts, is once again a place of exploration and discovery of the great figures of the movement through the “Paris Surréaliste” project conducted alongside the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Founded in 2002, the gallery Le Minotaure – borrowing its name from the legendary bookshop Le Minotaure located there in the 1950s – is inaugurating an exhibition, which also spread over two other venues (rue de Seine and rue Mazarine), exploring three central themes of Surrealism this autumn. “Simple forms”, inspired by nature and animal forms, “metamorphoses”, an inexhaustible source of creation for the Surrealist artists, and “dreams and nightmares”, through which they probed their unconscious. An ambitious exhibition, featuring the most famous figures of the period, from abstract sculptures by Jean Arp (1886-1966) and seductive photographs by Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) to hypnotic canvases by Francis Picabia (1879-1953) and, of course, André Breton (1896-1966), the author of the infamous Surrealist Manifesto (1924).

The exhibition “Surréel. Trois petites histoires surréalistes”, until November 30th, 2024, at Le Minotaure Gallery, 2 rue des Beaux-Arts, 23 rue de Seine, and 19 rue Mazarine, Paris 6e.