Over the coming months the
Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation and its Museum of Contemporary Art,
Andros, will be presenting a thematic tribute to Surrealism, one of the
greatest and most subversive art movements of the past century. Surrealism was
a movement of protest set to challenge all that had been the accepted norm
mainly in the art of verse, and by implication also in the visual arts. Rather
than evolving into an aesthetic school, it focused all its energies and
aspirations on inventing ways through which to change life itself, concerned as
it was not with aesthetic beauty but with the dynamics of the spirit.
With as many as 100
exhibits, including collages, paintings, and sculptures, constructions, prints,
and photographs, as well as highly relevant archival material, the exhibition
(which is scheduled to run from July 1 through to September 30, 2012) will
offer visitors the opportunity to ‘approach surrealism’ through the work of
both international and Greek artists.
Understandably, a visual
event with all its intrinsic limitations (see technical means, research and
funding potential) cannot possibly exhaust the ideological breadth and rich
iconography of that massively iconoclastic movement of the avant-garde (the
most popular of its kind since impressionism, as it turns out), which was born
of a complete surrender to the power of impulse and the dream, to automatic
writing and paradox, to the creative imagination and those repressed forces of
the mind, and which challenged iconographic convention and the established
cultural mores of post-war societies with unmitigated ferocity.
As its title emphatically
suggests, the exhibition aims to approach and in turn communicate the message
of an art that was bold enough to walk down the uncharted pathways of the soul
and so to open up new horizons; an art that passed from being the object of
dismissive irony, from an early stage of vagueness and fluidity, of quasi
totalitarianism and political dispute followed by purges of some of the
movement’s founding members, to achieving recognition and wide social appeal
and even having some degree of influence on social and cultural behaviours.
Even the name of that art, Surrealism, a term invented by coincidence, has long
since transcended its purely literary and artistic function and has found its
way into everyday speech to suggest the uncanny or paradoxical, the
extraordinary within the ordinary.
The event comprises two
sections:
The first, which makes up
the exhibition’s core section, deals with historical Surrealism and its
formative impact on twentieth-century sensibility, bringing together works by
approximately twenty artists and archival material pertaining both to founding
members and latecomers to the movement.
The second section attempts
an approach of the literary and visual achievements of the Greek surrealists.
The bilingual
(Greek-English) volume that is to accompany the exhibition will be produced by
the well-known Greek publishing house MIKRI ARKTOS and will feature an
introduction by MOCA-Andros director, Mr. Kyriakos Koutsomallis, and essays by
Mmes. Hélène Glykatzi-Ahrweiler, Nadja Argyropoulou, Ioulita Iliopoulou, and
Niki Loizidi, as well as Messrs. Nanos Valaoritis and Alecos Fassianos.
Related events organized in
the context of the exhibition will include, among others, a roundtable on
Surrealism featuring a number of literary luminaries among the key speakers,
chaired as always by University
of Europe Rector and
President, Mrs. Hélène Glykatzi-Ahrweiler.
