Artists Explore Otherworldly Depths of the Imagination in New Exhibition

DETROIT, MI.- Hold onto your mind as the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) presents some of the eeriest images portrayed in prints over the last 500 years. In Your Dreams: 500 Years of Imaginary Prints features more than 135 European and American prints from the DIA’s collection from some of the superstars of the art world, including Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Albrecht Dürer, Salvador Dalí and Marc Chagall. The exhibition will be on view through Jan. 2, 2011. In Your Dreams is organized by the DIA and is free with museum admission.

“It’s fascinating to see how some of the greatest artists throughout 500 years have imaginatively expressed their ideas about religion, politics, literature, social justice, and the human soul,” said Nancy Sojka, DIA curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. “The DIA’s print collection is so rich that we are able to include some of our ‘best-of-the-best’ works in the exhibition. Visitors are in for a real treat.”

Among the most significant prints that will be on view are Albrecht Dürer’s The Four Horsemen (1497/98), who represent conquest, war, famine and death, from his visionary woodcut series The Apocalypse; the complete set of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s large, fantastic Prisons (1761), that depicts haunting, nightmarish images of cavernous subterranean vaults; Francisco Goya’s eerie, pessimistic Los Proverbios (1816), complete with winged, bat-like humans; and Odilon Redon’s iconic lithographs from his Temptation of St. Anthony (1888), with its well-known free-flying eyeballs. Works by artists such as Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró present more modern twists on unworldly subjects inspired by each artist’s thoughts.