Life Line
In spring 2019, Amos Rex will be showing the works of the Belgian painter René Magritte (1898-1967) for the first time in Finland. Magritte, who is considered a leading figure in Surrealism, is particularly known for his works that turn everyday reality upside down; an apple fills a whole room and a nose becomes a pipe. The familiar is suddenly bafflingly strange.
The goal of Magritte’s various surrealistic periods was to solve the enigma of being human – Magritte sought an answer to the universal question of humanity through his art. He probed everyday reality in an attempt to grasp the mysteries hidden within.
The exhibition puts the artist himself centre stage: it is constructed around Magritte’s Life Line lecture, given in Antwerp in 1938. This was one of the rare occasions when the inscrutable artist revealed his working methods and artistic motivations. Magritte had otherwise always refused to explain his works, which gave glimpses of what “the mystery of the world” might look like in pictorial form.
The works on display give a multi-faceted view of the development of Magritte’s working process in different periods. The phases of Magritte’s life and his ideas lend wings to this journey through the artist’s chequered career, right from the early days of Surrealism to his “Vache period”. Besides the visual arts, the supplementary programme for this exhibition by the cinephile artist also extends to Bio Rex’s silver screen in the guise of the silent film serial Fantômas by Louis Feuillade.
The exhibition is realised in collaboration with the MASI, Museo d’arte della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. The curators are two Belgian Surrealism experts: Director of the Musée de la Photographie à Charleroi, Xavier Canonne; and art historian Julie Waseige.
Magritte's Surrealism
Surrealism is a movement in modern art, literature and film that was at its most influential between the world wars, but its heritage can still be seen in the visual arts today, too. It sprang up as a protest against realism and Cubism – Surrealism literally means “being above the real”. The movement was led by the French poet André Breton, and the ranks of famous surrealists include Salvador Dali and Joan Miró. The Surrealists emphasized art that comes about without the conscious control of reason, aesthetics or morality, and were interested in dreams and psychoanalytic theory.
René Magritte and his Belgian Surrealist circle, nevertheless, diverged from the mainstream in their use of reality as a tool for calling that very reality into question. Magritte was not so interested in the subconscious, but used his art to investigate reality as an untrustworthy, ideological structure. Chopping it up and borrowing elements from it, nevertheless, allowed him to address fundamental questions about human existence – in Magritte’s words “the mystery of the world”.
