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16/2/2005

Paris and the surrealists

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona CCCB, Barcelona

Retrospective

370 works highlight the relevance and modernity of the surrealist movement, and its relation with its host city.

Co-produced by the CCCB and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, where it will be presented from June to September 2005. Paris and the surrealists looks at surrealism from inside the movement. Taking a broad overview, it analyses the main themes that the artists dealt with and highlights the relevance and modernity of the movement. The city of Paris is the linchpin: the over 370 works - paintings, sculptures, photographs, found objects, primitive art, popular and naive art - that make up the exhibition were inspired, created, shown or collected in the French capital. For the surrealists, Paris was a city to love like a human being, a forest of wonders, an exceptional place of desire...

The worshop of the future
A whole constellation of artists, writers, film directors, activ ists and revolutionaries met in Paris after World War I. Drawn to the City of Light, the art capital since the 19th century, they brought about an authentic revolution in the field not just of images but also of ideas. This phenomenon of passionate get-togethers, rife with great emotional and political tensions, produced spectacular results between 1919 and 1966. Paris became, in the words of Guy Debord, the “workshop of the future”, with numerous surrealist works providing the spark for countless subsequent artistic productions.

A total emancipation of the individual.
After the two 2002 major European exhibitions. Surrealism. Desire Unbound, at the Tate Modern, and La Révolution surréaliste, at the Centre Pompidou, studies about the movement have proliferated in academic circles, and a critical debate has begun following the publication of the book by Jean Clair, Du Surréalisme that challenges the radicalism of the movement. This exhibition intends to reconstitute and explain the movement not just from its aesthetic viewpoint but also from its ethically mould-breaking spirit and recall its revolutionary political stance - in short, to remind spectators that surrealism, far from being a mere literary or artistic school, aspired to the total emancipation of the individual.

Surrealism and its host city
As the Centre de Cultura Contemporània specializes in the relationship between city and culture, the exhibition devotes particular attention to the relations that surrealism established with its host city, and especially the places liked by the surrealists, the passages, the marchés aux puces, the cafés, certain public monuments, the lit-up advertisements, the circus and the cabarets. Organised around a series of themes that marked the developme nt of surrealism in Paris between the wars, from Foreunners to the exhibition gives a major role to audiovisual language, and a film cycle is organised alongside, including surrealist films and others about the Paris of the 1930s.

PUBLICATION
Exhibition catalogue Catalan, Spanish, English, reproducing all of the works on show with articles by specialists in the field: Jean Michel Goutier El surrealismo y los infortunios de la política, Dominique Rabourdin Las revistas del surrealismo, Robert Lebel(El surrealismo en vísperas de la guerra, los objetos surrealistas and the curator, Victoria Combalia Eros femenino surreal. 354 pages, 17 x 24 cm. 24 €

Image: André Masson Le fil d'Ariane, 1938 Oil and sand on wood 22 x 27 cm. Private collection, París © André Masson, ADAGP 2005

CCCB Centre de Cultura Contemporània Barcelona - Montalegre 5 - Barcelona
HOURS:Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays: 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sundays and holidays: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays: closed (except public holidays)
PRICES OF ADMISSION:Full price: 4 € Concessions 3 €: senior citizens, students, unemployed, and on Wednesdays (except public holidays) Free: under 16 and Friends of the CCCB
Articket: 17 €. Admission to the CCCB, the MACBA, the MNAC, La Pedrera, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies and the Fundació Joan Miró

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