London is hosting a huge Surrealist exhibition with works from Magritte
Bowler hats at the ready
Luckily, London’s art scene is not reserved for those with an art history degree nor a toothbrush moustache and pinstripe trouser suit. Instead, there are plenty of free glorious galleries and museums dotted across the city which regularly host displays of some of the biggest and most celebrated names. One of which is the Gagosian Gallery who will be hosting a huge new surrealist exhibition this month.
“This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte” will show around 70 works by the Belgian Surrealist and dozens of contemporary artists inspired by him.
The exhibition will be on view at the Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill outpost in London from 24th September until 12th December, showing a collection of some of the most celebrated surrealist works, as well as new works which are being made especially for the show. The location for the exhibition is a nod to the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition which was staged just down the road at the New Burlington Galleries, marking a key moment for the surrealist movement and in making Magritte’s name.
Gagosian has not yet released a full list of artworks or the names of the contemporary figures who will be involved in the exhibition. However it has confirmed that the show will include more than 20 Magrittes, some for sale and some on loan from major collections.
One of the paintings includes La Lampe philosophique, which the artist made just ahead of the 1936 Surrealist exhibition. It’s the one you’ll probably recognise from a postcard someone in your family got in a museum gift shop or a jaunty teatowel that has been slung over the oven for half a decade. The painting depicts Magritte smoking a pipe by candlelight, his overgrown nose snaking into the pipe’s bowl. He wrote of it: “The meditations of an absent-minded, obsessive philosopher may conjure up the image of a mental world closed in upon itself as, in this case, the smoker is the prisoner of his pipe.”
Other Magrittes with his most iconic motifs—apples, bowler hats, clouds, and of course more pipes—will be peppered throughout.
The show comes 20 years after “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images” (2006–07), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art‘s landmark group exhibition designed by artist John Baldessari that traced the Surrealist’s influence on postwar American and European artists.
Larry Gagosian, owner of the Gagosian, said: ‘It is difficult to imagine a world today without Magritte. Almost six decades after his death, his influence continues to resonate within contemporary artistic production, and beyond into the broader landscape of visual culture – shaping advertising, design, fashion, and even music.
‘I am delighted to be presenting his work at the gallery once again, and to offer audiences a renewed opportunity to engage with the poetry, wit, and mystery that define his vision.’
The exhibition is free to look around, although if you did want to buy one of the pieces for sale, just a heads up, his last pieces that were up for auction went for for £16 million (La Belle Promenade) and $121.2 million (Empire of Light) the last couple of years.
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