National Galleries of Scotland Announce Overview of Surrealist Movement

EDINBURGH.- A comprehensive survey of Surrealist art, which will bring together masterpieces by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró, will be the major summer exhibition at the Dean Gallery in 2010. Another World, which will be the centrepiece of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s 50th anniversary celebrations, will offer a fascinating overview of arguably the most important art movement of the twentieth century. The exhibition will include major loans from public and private collections and will offer visitors the chance to see the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s world-famous collection of Surrealist art in its entirety for the first time.

Surrealism is the name given to an art movement which began in Paris in the 1920s and soon spread around the globe. Meaning ‘beyond realism’, the term refers to the world of dreams, nightmares, the irrational and the strange. Today Surrealism has become part of our daily visual language, infiltrating every aspect of art, design and advertising.

The Surrealist collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) is one of the largest anywhere in the world and rivals those found in New York, Paris, Chicago and London. As well as containing dozens of famous paintings and sculptures, it also includes a substantial number of prints, archival material, periodicals, books, letters and other publications. Another World will explore this collection in its totality and will include several print portfolios which have never been shown before by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. The holdings of Surrealist art are particularly rich thanks to two major acquisitions: in 1995 the SNGMA purchased part of the collection formed by the English Surrealist artist Roland Penrose; and that same year, Gabrielle Keiller bequeathed her magnificent collection to the Gallery.

Befitting an art movement which championed the irrational, Another World will be displayed in an unusual and exciting manner. Coloured walls will be densely hung alongside display cases filled with the Gallery’s extensive collection of books and manuscripts. In this dynamic setting visitors will be able to experience the visceral intensity of Surrealist art shown as it was originally intended. This is the only UK showing of this major exhibition.

Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art, said: ‘The 50th anniversary of the Gallery provides us with a wonderful opportunity to celebrate our world-famous collection of Surrealist art. The collection contains over sixty paintings, including masterpieces by artists such as Dalí, Miró and Picasso, as well as four of Magritte’s best paintings, collages and prints by Max Ernst, major sculptures by artists including Giacometti and Duchamp, and a vast collection of rare and beautiful, illustrated books. This will be the first time the entire collection will have been shown together, and will occupy the whole of the Dean Gallery. We have also negotiated some outstanding loans, to produce a really comprehensive and stunning exhibition.’

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