R+V's exhibition of contemporary Surrealism, A Mysterious Vision, curated by Robert Zeller, is highlighted as one of the top shows to see around New York during May – featuring celebrated and lesser-known artists. The show, writes Julie Brener Davich, gives a compelling and comprehensive journey into some of the ways that artists today are inspired in their practices by the Surrealist movement.
Davich's full write-up of the show reads:
“Uncanny Figuration”
A few blocks away at Robilant + Voena is the group show A Mysterious Vision, curated by Robert Zeller, based on his book, New Surrealism. “Surrealism is the most significant art movement of the last century,” he posits in his catalogue introduction for the show. Both his book and the exhibition delve into the influences of surrealism in contemporary art—and once you see them, you’ll never unsee them.
Zeller groups the paintings in four themes across the gallery’s four rooms: Uncanny Figuration, Psychic Landscape, Psychic Interior, and Non-Objective Fragments. Anchoring each room is one historical work by a titan of the genre: Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, and Yves Tanguy. (The first two paintings are loans; the latter two are for sale.) The participating artists jumped at the chance to show their works alongside these masters.
The room of portraits (“Uncanny Figuration”) shows subjects rendered faithfully but in non-sequitur environments, like the 1942 Fini depiction of a nude woman amid leafy branches, loaned from the FAMM Museum in Mougins. The other works are by Jamie Adams, Arghavan Khosravi, and Nicola Verlato, plus a searing portrait by Laura Krifka of a woman turning her head to the side, as if being asked to smile and refusing to, with a teethlike wallpaper pattern in the background.
The grouping of “Psychic Landscapes”—meaning landscapes of the psyche—stars Carrington’s The Lovers, 1987, also loaned from the FAMM Museum. Last exhibited a few months ago in a show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, the composition is based on the tarot card of the same name, with two lovers in bed in a tent in the desert. Nearby is Matt Hansel’s absurdist painting of four dancers—five if you count the graceful bird-lizard creature that one of the dancers is lifting above his head. The composition is like a game of seek-and-find with spoils that include a tiny nude man and a woman lounging in a bird’s nest, and a French horn sticking out of something that looks like—or is?—butt cheeks.
“Non-Objective Fragments” refers to abstract surrealism, which inspired the New York school and abstract expressionism. “To the degree that automatism lives on in the contemporary art world, one could argue that it does so mainly through non-objective art,” writes Zeller in the wall text. Think of Yves Tanguy. Some of his contemporary descendants represented in the show are Alessandro Keegan, Kristy Luck, Alicia Adamerovich, and Vincent Desiderio. The fourth section, “Psychic Interior,” refers to interior spaces as metaphors for the human mind, with a painting by de Chirico paired with work by Lars Elling, Ginny Casey, Lola Gil, and Tim Kent. The groupings in the show, accompanied by Zeller’s digestible explanations, really help to distill this complex and multifaceted genre.