´óÏó´«Ã½

Posted: Thursday, 3rd May 2007

As you’d expect, the truth about Surrealism is full of paradoxes and contradictions. It’s the most successful and least successful of all avant-garde art movements—its insights and attitudes have become so dominant that most non-artists take them for granted (the surreal language of advertising, movies, the internet, comedy). Most contemporary artists, schooled to see through conceptual eyes, regard it as embarrassingly unsophisticated.

To make the case for Surrealism in the 21st Century you have to fend off what Andre Breton called "the contempt for the marvellous", while resisting the visual numbness that our image-saturated world induces. It’s no longer possible to find beauty in the "chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table", but there are contemporary equivalents of this shop-worn juxtaposition which do reassert "the omnipotence of the dream".

With contributions from some of today’s most innovative creative minds, such as Grayson Perry, Marcel Dzama and Michel Gondry, Imagine… takes a dreamlike journey into today’s surreal unknown.