Vancouver, Canada – ‘The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art’ is the most comprehensive exhibition of surrealist art ever presented in Canada. Included are outstanding works by Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy and other leading figures of Surrealism. Guest curator Dawn Ades, a renowned scholar and leading expert on the movement, has selected more than 300 works of art that underscore the radical sense of experimentation that contributed to the founding of Surrealism in the 1920s and resulted in a rich diversity of painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and film in the ensuing decades.
André Breton wrote the first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. With the ideas of Sigmund Freud as a major inspiration, Breton set out an approach to creativity that would free artists from what was seen as “false rationality” and tap directly into the unconscious mind and dreams. The exhibition will explore the themes of desire, androgyny, violence, transmutation and dream states that captured the imagination of Surrealist artists and were explored repeatedly over several decades. It will also highlight techniques invented by artists in the movement, including automatism, frottage, fumage and the surrealist object, an approach to sculpture in which several unrelated components, most often found objects, were joined together.On exhibit May 28 – September 25 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
In addition to providing a comprehensive overview of one of the twentieth century’s most important artistic movements, the exhibition also examines (for the first time) the passionate interest in the indigenous art of the Pacific Northwest by Surrealist artists such as Breton, Enrico Donati, Robert Lebel, Wolfgang Paalen and Kurt Seligmann. The exhibition reveals the formative influence of early silent cinema, in particular American films starring performers such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, on the development of surrealist film. This historic exhibition brings together loans from many of the world’s foremost public and private collections including the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Musée du quai Branly and the Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Tate in London. This exhibition is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Dawn Ades.
In its 79-year history, the Vancouver Art Gallery has expanded three times. Currently operating at and beyond capacity after nearly 30 years in the renovated former provincial courthouse building, the Gallery is now planning a new, purpose-built facility that will meet the community’s needs for the next 50 years and beyond. Construction of the original Vancouver Art Gallery building began in March of 1931, funded by $130,000 raised by a group of art patrons led by Vancouver businessman Henry A. Stone. In 1951, the Vancouver Art Gallery at 1145 Georgia Street was expanded to three times it original size in order to accommodate 157 works by Emily Carr, willed by the artist to the province of British Columbia before her death in 1945. The Vancouver Art Gallery remained at 1145 Georgia Street until 1983, when it moved to its present location in the former provincial courthouse building bound by Georgia, Howe, Hornby and Robson Streets. The new Vancouver Art Gallery opened to the public in October 1983 in the retrofitted courthouse building with 41,400 square feet of exhibition space. The Vancouver Art Gallery’s collection originated with few Canadian works and a strong emphasis on British historical painting.
The Vancouver Art Gallery houses a number of major works by Canadian artists (in addition to the Emily Carr collection), including Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Jock Macdonald, J.W. Morrice, David Milne, Harold Town, Gershon Iskowitz and Jack Bush. The collection includes a number of works by some of Quebec’s best known artists, including Theophile Hamel, Antoine Plamondon, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, Paul-Emile Borduas, Guido Molinari, Jacques de Tonnancour, Claude Tousignant, Charles Gagnon, Yves Gaucher, Alfred Pellan and Jean-Paul Lemieux. The Gallery has acquired major works by Quebecois contemporaries such as Genviève Cadieux, Jana Sterbak, Jocelyne Alloucherie and Betty Goodwin. The Gallery’s European historical collection includes Dutch paintings from the seventeenth century by Jan Anthoniszoon van Ravenstyn, Jan Wynants, Isaac van Ostade, Pieter Neeffs the Elder, Jacob Marrel, Jan van Huysum, Balthasar van der Ast, Ambrosium Bosschaert the Younger, Jan Josefsz van Goyen, Abraham Storck, Roelof de Vries, Willem van de Velde the Younger, Adriaen van der Kabel, Salomon van Ruysdael, Flemish-Cornelius de Heem, Roelandt Savery and a fine first edition of Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes’ Disasters of War. Visit the museum’s website at … www.vanartgallery.bc.ca