Surrealism Today

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Art Exhibition

Philippe Charles Jacquet: Les Reclus (27 April–19 May, 2019)

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Will you be in New York City in April? Then you can’t miss Philippe Charles Jacquet’s surrealistic landscapes.

Philippe Charles Jacquet is an architectural painter: his haunting surrealistic landscapes are an exercise in precision, layered variety, and esoterism

Opening Reception on 27 April, 2019, 6-8pm
RSVP Required: info@hugogalerie.com

Les Reclus is a solo exhibition featuring the carefully articulated dreamscapes of Philippe Charles Jacquet to be exhibited at the Hugo Galerie in New York City. The show introduces new pieces by the artist in his celebrated style in which he builds his watery worlds with various and highly planned painting techniques.

Les Reclus’ title is more relevant to his canvas’ structural capacity than their figural; while most canvases contain more than one figure, rarely does a canvas contain more than one structure. The reclusivity of Jacquet’s built environments, dramatically poised within surreal and stretching landscapes, lends his paintings an enigmatic quality. Adding to their mystery is the fact that they cannot be quickly dismissed as make-believe—they are too realistic, too aligned with our own experiences of stone houses, wooden rowboats, reflection pools, receding tides, and cloud-filled horizons. Even the slope of a figure’s slouching shoulders is too… personal.

Jacquet is an architectural painter; he plans his landscapes and their built environments with measured precision, constructing them in a layered variety of media and methods until they are as real as they are imagined. The materiality finessed, from mirror-like water to rust-scored wood grain, brings his painted compositions to life. The combination of textures, geometric accuracy, and concise colors creates an esotericism that includes viewers rather than excludes them; Jacquet’s solitary structures do not reject but envelop the viewer with the familiarity of a feeling. As if we’ve been here before. Perhaps in a dream.

Hugo Galerie is a fine art gallery in New York City specializing in contemporary figurative painting and sculpture. The gallery represents an international roster of artists working in a variety of media and range of genres.

Le Reclus, oil on board, 311⁄2″ x 311⁄2″ (80 x 80cm)
Le Port d’Attache, oil on board, 283⁄4” x 351⁄2” (73 x 90.2cm)
Une Soirée Ordinaire, oil on board, 471⁄4″ x 471⁄4″ (120 x 120cm)

See Jacquet’s previous feature in Surrealism Today from 2015.

Mohammad Zaza

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Mohammad Zaza, Syrian artist, was born in Riyadh in 1987. Growing up in an artistic family, he started drawing and painting at an early age. After completing high school in Saudi Arabia, he moved to Syria in 2006 to study at the faculty of Fine Arts in Aleppo University. He held his first solo exhibition in 2008 and, after his graduation in 2010, was appointed as a painting teacher assistant at the University until 2012. Besides painting on big size canvases mainly, he also works on illustrations and animations.

In his artworks, Mohammad Zaza focuses on the movement that lies behind fixed scenes, enhancing the subject in order to open new scopes of reality. Because his paintings aspire to work as a window to another dimension of life, his shapes emphasize the unity of the source of thoughts, allowing the viewer to apprehend with him the Origins.

Via mohammadzaza.com

Exhibition: Mohammad Zaza – The earth is blue like an orange
Opening: Thursday 21 April, 18:30
Dates: 22 April 2016 – 18 May 2016

“The earth is blue like an orange”, the words of the French surrealist writer Paul Eluard appear as an invitation to set our minds free from all their inner limits. They reflect the idea that the poetic image is a pure creation of the mind, in which the unconscious travels beyond the traditional borders. Listening to the voices of these less known territories magnify our perceptions and unravel the feelings hidden behind our visible realities. Any thoughts are possible for people who manage to adopt an alternative and less conventional look at things and experiences.

Living and working in Istanbul for almost two years Mohammad Zaza have been dealing with this idea of resourcefulness and creativity for a long time. He pushes the viewer to delve into a world full of untold stories, a space where each painting connects with everyone’s personal wanderings. Topics such as nature, humanity and spirituality are involved, all of them creating a universal dimension to his work. With a solid background and a strong artistic identity, Zaza wishes to share with its public a new dimension of visual experience, outweighing any predetermined concepts, ideas and rules.

Mohammad Zaza was born in Riyadh in 1987. Growing up in an artistic family, he started drawing and painting at an early age. After completing high school in Saudi Arabia, he moved to his homeland Syria in 2006 to study at the faculty of Fine Arts in Aleppo University. He held his first solo exhibition in 2008 and, after his graduation in 2010, was appointed as a painting teacher assistant at the University until 2012. Besides painting on big size canvases mainly, he also works on illustrations and animations.

Via The Depot

Surrealism: the conjured life at the MCA of Chicago

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Surrealism: the conjured life at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago is an exhibition running from Nov 21, 2015–Jun 5, 2016. The exhibition includes surrealist who participated in Breton’s original surrealist movement, as well as its influence in successive generations of artists (especially Chicago based artists.) These artists include Imagist Ed Paschke, Gertrude Abercrombie, H.C. Westermann, and Gladys Nilsson.

Surrealism: The Conjured Life presents more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs that demonstrate the deep currents that Surrealism sent through the international art world—and especially through Chicago—since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century. A global movement that encompassed a wide number of art forms, including film, theater, poetry, and literature, Surrealism came of age with poet André Breton’s formal declaration in 1924. This deeply emotional and psychological art form flourished in the 1930s and 1940s—turbulent times of economic instability, rapidly changing social mores, and war.

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The exhibition is built on a spiral inner wall of influential surrealists and expands outward to the artists they influenced, including Chicago artists from the so-called “Monster Roster” of the 1950s and ’60s as well as the Chicago Imagists.

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Surrealism found fertile ground in Chicago, I think in part because the art history of this town was always looking at the figure and representational imagery. There were some abstract artists here of course, but the overriding style was representational, and surrealism is a representational art form which followed on the heels of a very abstract time for art in Europe. I think that was one of the reasons there was this convergence between what the surrealists were doing in Europe and then the sort of tastes or interests of the Chicago collectors and Chicago audiences.

Via MCA.org

 

 

Surrealist art brings dreams and reality closer together–sometimes uncomfortably so. The movement started in Paris in the 1920s and influenced generations of Chicago and other American artists. Its echoes are heard loud and clear today.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago dug deep into its holdings and brought forth a trove of surrealist art that is both foreign and familiar in the exhibition “Surrealism: The Conjured Life.”

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