Salvador Dali and Wilhelm Freddie. Joan Miro and Ejler Bille. Rene' Magritte and Richard Mortensen. This exhibition interprets Danish Surrealism in an international perspective. In more than 130 paintings, collages, photographs, sculptures, drawings, objects, journals and texts, the exhibition sheds light on the Danish Surrealists.
THE TRIUMPH OF DESIRE is the title of ARKEN’s major autumn exhibition. The Surrealists cultivated sexual drives and the unconscious in order to liberate society and the individual from the conventions of the period. Surrealism challenged the norms and taboos of the age. In so doing it had an epoch-making and enduring influence on visual art and culture. ARKEN’s exhibition shows the dialogue between Danish and international Surrealism.
OVERWHELMED
Surrealism was one of the most influential and spectacular currents of the twentieth century. The movement arose in Paris in the 1920s and inundated the rest of Europe in the 1930s. The Danish art scene too was overwhelmed by the wild ideas of the Surrealists. The Danish artists soaked up inspiration from the wide world outside and several of them exhibited together with the major international Surrealist artists both in Denmark and abroad.
THE TRIUMPH OF DESIRE dusts off Danish Surrealism and makes the connections with the turbulent, phantasmagorical universe of the international Surrealists. The exhibition shows works by Danish artists like Freddie, Bille, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen, Henry Heerup and Asger Jorn in the context of works by among others Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Jean Arp.
THE EROTIC
With its focus on the erotic in nature and everyday life, THE TRIUMPH OF DESIRE reinterprets Danish Surrealism in an international perspective, with the latest research as a guide. The works in the exhibition show how Danish Surrealism participated in the European currents of the period and at the same time established an independent position: from the fluid natural forms and explicitly sexual motifs of the 1930s to the budding CoBrA art of the early 1940s.
The exhibition shows more than 130 paintings, drawings, sculptures, objects, photographs and collages. It also documents the relations between Danish and international Surrealism through periodicals, texts and exhibition catalogues. The works have been lent out by central Danish and international museums as well as galleries and private collectors in Denmark and abroad.
For further information please contact:
Communications Manager Christina Bilde (phone +45 43 57 34 10, e-mail bilde@arken.dk) or
Communications Officer Signe Mølgaard (phone +45 43 57 34 09, e-mail signe.moelgaard@arken.dk)
Arken Museum of Modern Art
Skovvej 100 - Ishoj