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Artworks: Surrealism and Biomorphism
"Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality."
André Breton, 1924
In the wake of World War I, many intellectuals rejected the ideal of progress that characterized the first waves of the Modernist avant garde. Seeking a means to comprehend a more complex reality, they embraced Sigmund Freud's methods of analysis and celebrated the unconscious as a source of creativity. The Parisian poet André Breton was at the forefront of this movement, and in 1924 he issued the first "Manifesto of Surrealism," advocating a new freedom in the arts. Over the following two decades Breton brought together an international alliance of artists and writers who shared his beliefs. Although the movement disbanded during World War II, Surrealist themes continued to flourish across the twentieth century.
Early Surrealist sculptors used assemblage and found materials to create poetic objects; through unlikely juxtapositions they captured the sometimes illogical leaps of imagination and dreams. In later years, however, such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti, and Joan Miró began to sculpt figures and personages that powerfully evoke twin currents of mystery and reminiscence. Bourgeois's Quarantania I is a haunting assembly of abstract figures, summoning up the artist's early family experiences. Giacometti's Large Standing Woman I explores the limits of perception and memory, and Miró's monumental Bird captures the primal, almost feral nature of the creative spirit.
A second current that emerged out of Surrealism was biomorphic abstraction. Much as some artists had uncovered meaning in juxtaposition and archetypes, others turned to the generative forms of the natural world for inspiration. Lucio Fontana's Spatial Concept, Nature, Nos. 18 & 28, for example, appear as seed pods or meteors, pregnant and mysterious.
Mimmo Paladino's sculptures attest to the lasting influence of Surrealism. In his poignant The Sound of Night of 1986, Paladino revisits the disquieting sensibility of Breton and his contemporaries, tapping into both cultural archetypes and the language of dreams.
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© Photography by Rocky Kneten
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