Exhibition dates: 6th – 19th August 2016

Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.
Giorgio de Chirico

What is Surrealism?

Surrealism is the dictation of thought which has been locked – in the absence of all reason-driven control – outside any aesthetic and moral preoccupation. (from the Surrealist Manifesto, 1924)

The 504 Gallery presents Surreal Art: a group exhibition exploring the artwork of both local and international emerging artists.
The collection showcases the diversely interpreted creative legacy of the Surreal movement’s origins.
Exploring the unconscious to unlock the imagination’s power, the surrealists believed that the rational mind repressed conscious creativity, weighing it down with taboos.

Artists painted unnerving, logic-defying scenes, sculpting strangeness, and developing painting techniques that unleashed living dreams.
Surreal Art had a great reception in London. There, a Surrealist group developed. According to Andrè Breton – Surrealism’s founder, and the writer of its first manifesto – the group’s 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high point of the period, and became the model for international exhibitions.

And, still in London, this show celebrates Surrealism’s seamless insanity – and its eternal power to express our experience of the world.

ARTISTS:

Antonio Caramia, Iulian Arsenie, Itziar Ortiz Gonzalez, Jonathan Graham, Laura Fitzpatrick, Kirsty McLean, S.R. Jimmy, Paolo Penitente, Sarah McKenzie.