Sheraah: SURREALISM EXHIBITION, NEUE NATIONALGALERIE BERLIN.

I’ve always been a fan of the surrealists artists – to me their work is more fun and immediately satisfying than the other genres of art. So, you can imagine how thrilled I was to discover while on a mini-break in Berlin that the Neue Nationalgalerie (Staatliche Museum zu Berlin) was exhibiting Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch’s collection of surrealist works. This included pieces by everyone from the founder of the surrealist movement André Breton to pieces by the popular René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Joan Miro and the less obvious Mark Tobey and Meret Oppenheimer. The exhibition was HUGE, two hours was inadequate and by 10pm closing time my brain was throbbing and my eyes pulsating.

André Breton defined Surrealism as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”

I think he was talking about the transformation of imagination into something tangible. The capacity of one imagination gives rise to countless ideas, multiply this by the number of artists caught in the sails of the surrealist movement and what you have is a bunch of art that doesn’t immediately appear to fit the same definition. However, the wild imagination is obviously not without influence which is clear from the similarity in styles between Paul Delaux and René Magritte or Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy.

... One thing that stuck me about the exhibition was not only the way in which the surrealist artists influenced each other or shared common inspiration but how important surrealist art has been since the Dada movement gave birth to it around the 1920’s. It goes without saying that it has influenced today’s film, music and art. I will end with two examples of this which straight away had me narrowing my eyes and wagging my finger while asking “hang on one tick”; firstly the similarities between The Space Pirates in Luc Besson’s 1996 Fifth Element and the figures in Max Ernst’s 1920 Capricorn sculptures and secondly the Chapmans brothers Zygotic acceleration biogenetic de-sublimated libidi piece which was definitely done before by Hans Hoffman in 1935.

SPACE PIRATES, THE FIFTH ELEMENT