Imaginary Realities: Surrealism Then and Now

Louis Stern Fine Arts opens the fall season with an exhibition of Surrealist art.

As a historical movement, Surrealism sought to rewrite the rules and subvert the content of traditional art making.  The exhibition presents Surrealist themes that can be traced through the major works of European masters such as Dali, Tanguy, Magritte, Matta, Ernst, Picasso, Bellmer and Delvaux, to the Surrealist influence in the United States.  Also included are works by Man Ray, Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell, as well as classic Post-surrealist works by Helen Lundeberg, Lorser Feitelson, and Knud Merrild.

From the 1960’s works by Nicholas Brigante and Gordon Wagner are included.  Wagner, a motivating force in the California Assemblage movement, produced raw, earth-born constructions containing elements infused with psychic, even religious potency.  

The exhibition will also contain an important representation of Surrealist work from Mexico, including paintings by Remedios Varo and Marie José Paz.  Paz has produced constructions for over 20 years; her work is deeply provocative, with the infinite resonance of a great poem.  Cecilia Miguez, an emerging sculptor from Uruguay, creates bronze figures which are elegant and airy.  Their dream-like unreality seems to contradict the material of which they are made. 

The Surrealists developed an art which traced the psychological landscape, giving full authority to fantasy and free association.  They created an art that gloried in the irrational, the taboo, and the sinister.  The Surrealist approach to art did not die when the artists finally dissolved their official (ever changing) organization. Rather, it has lived through the decades in the works of many mid-century and contemporary artists who have had similar faith in the power of the unconscious mind. 

Contemporary Los Angeles artists Llyn Foulkes, F. Scott Hess, Peter Sokosky, Dan Abrahmson, and Maddy Le Mel have all produced work with powerful Surrealist imagery.  The Foulkes, Hess and Sokosky paintings in the exhibition are suggestive of the dreamscape, psychological environments in which the subconscious has free rein.  Similarly, in the box constructions of Le Mel and Abrahmson the viewer supplies meaning and significance to the objects by way of a personal stream of consciousness.  Surrealism is approached at a more oblique angle in the works of Ed Ruscha and Bruce Houston.

Imaginary Realities: Surrealism Then and Now willl be on view during gallery hours:  Tuesday through Friday, 10am-6pm and Saturday, 11am-5pm.  Parking is available on the street and in the Apcoa parking lot on Melrose Avenue, west of Almont Drive.