- Venue
- Barbican Arts Centre
- Location
If you are in need of some good old fashioned Surrealism and can’t afford to go all the way to The Dalí Theatre Museum in Figueres in Spain or even Spain or France, then have no fear there is a contemporary exhibition of everything you could ever need to learn about the popular 20th Century art movement at the Barbican Gallery.
The purpose of this exhibition is to introduce us to familiar and unfamiliar territory, presenting an over-load of information that guarantees an expert in Surrealism with every audience member served. A wunderkammer appeal and starry collection of work make this exhibit out to be a sure-fire hit. With an estimated one-hundred-and-fifty works The Surreal House utilises the Barbican Gallery space to phenomenal effect showcasing the likes of Surrealism’s founding fathers and mothers such as Louise Bourgeois, René Magritte and Hans Bellmer, alongside later icons such as Sarah Lucas and Rachel Whiteread, film-makers Buster Keaton, Cocteau and Maya Deren and architect Rem Koolhaas. There are sixteen rooms with their own individual qualities that are presenting a mini-Walking In My Mind exhibit that some of us may have seen at The Hayward Gallery a year ago (23 June – 6 September 2009).
There are one or two recognisable faces such as Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte and Man Ray whilst also presenting us some contemporary artists whose work has fallen into the Surrealist category, analysing that there is still a valid Surrealist art movement in contemporary society and it did not pass away by the 1980s (Dalí’s death in 1989).
Room one (Press to Enter!) shows a dedication to the earliest Surrealist artists with Buster Keaton’s (1895–1966) 1928 movie Steamboat Bill Jr as well as an accompanying contemporary’s ‘Surrealist house’; Donald Rodney and a tiny house made of his own skin. Room two (The House of Freud) moves to a monumental theme, named after the Surrealist patron-saint Sigmund Freud; Rooms three, four, six, seven, nine, ten, fourteen and fifteen are sharing a sub-theme of exploration into space and structure whether involving architecture, presence, or absence. Meanwhile, room five is the introduction to female Surrealism, showing the unforgettable Louise Bourgeois as a headliner and then by the time of room eight (Electric Palace) we have taken a time-machine back to the days of old-fashioned cinema’s showcasing the latest films only a Surrealist twist! Rooms eleven, twelve and thirteen are mixed around geometry, the mother and mad love which can very well be merged together into a Surrealist cycle of life. Finally, the piers de resistance room sixteen (The Sacrifice) is a lovely tribute to Surrealism with the medium of cinema playing the 1986 Russian film The Sacrifice by Andrei Tarkovsky presently not-necessarily a modern interpretation of Surrealism but rather a ‘psychic palm reading’ of Surrealism – superstitious but believable.
A truly spectacular exhibit chronicling a history record of Surrealism and its history, culture, figures, children and grandchildren and prophesising a place for Surrealism in contemporary society. Young architects Carmody Groarke transform the Barbican’s galleries into a dreamscape, with exhibits standing in for wobbly fittings and fixtures beginning with Duchamp’s relief of a woman’s breast, which doubles as a doorbell. It presents a Dalí Theatre Museum in London that if he would have envied.
