Yves Tanguy
(1900 - 1955)

Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy, known as just Yves Tanguy  was a French surrealist painter. Tanguy's paintings have a unique, immediately recognizable style of nonrepresentational surrealism. They show vast, abstract landscapes, mostly in a tightly limited palette of colors, only occasionally showing flashes of contrasting color accents. Typically, these alien landscapes are populated with various abstract shapes, sometimes angular and sharp as shards of glass, sometimes with an intriguingly organic look to them, like giant amoebae suddenly turned to stone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Tanguy

Mama, Papa is Wounded!
1927
Oil on canvas
92,1 x 73 cm
MoMA
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78701

 

According to Nathalia Brodskaïa, Mama, Papa is Wounded! (1927) is one of Tanguy's most impressive paintings. Brodskaïa writes that the painting reflects his debt to Giorgio de Chirico – falling shadows and a classical torso – and conjures up a sense of doom: the horizon, the emptiness of the plain, the solitary plant, the smoke, the helplessness of the small figures. Tanguy said that it was an image he saw entirely in his imagination before starting to paint it.

Pierre Roy
(1880 - 1950)

Pierre Roy was a French surrealist painter. He is known for his realistically painted compositions of ordinary objects in unexpected arrangements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Roy_(painter)

Danger dans l'escalier (Danger on the stairs)
1928,
oil on canvas,
91 × 60 cm
MoMA
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78972

George Tooker
(1696 - 1744)

George Clair Tooker, Jr. (August 5, 1920 – March 27, 2011) was an American figurative painter. His works are associated with Magic realism, Social realism, Photorealism, and Surrealism. His subjects are depicted naturally as in a photograph, but the images use flat tones, an ambiguous perspective, and alarming juxtapositions to suggest an imagined or dreamed reality. He did not agree with the association of his work with Magic realism or Surrealism, as he said, "I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy." In 1968, he was elected to the National Academy of Design and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tooker was one of nine recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tooker

Sleepers II
1959
Tempera on wood panel
40,8 x 71,1 cm
MoMA
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79548?artist_id=5900&page=1&sov_referrer=artist

 Arshile Gorky
(1904 - 1948)
 

Arshile Gorky (born Vostanik Manoug Adoian) was an Armenian-American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. He spent the last years of his life as a national of the United States. Along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Gorky has been hailed as one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century. The suffering and loss he experienced in the Armenian genocide had crucial influence at Gorky’s development as an artist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arshile_Gorky

Garden in Sochi
1941
oil on canvas.
112 x 158 cm.
MoMA
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79474

Enrique Tábara
(1930 - 2021)
 

Luis Enrique Tábara was a master Ecuadorian painter and teacher representing a whole Hispanic pictorial and artistic culture.  
Tábara was greatly influenced by the Constructivist Movement, founded around 1913 by Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin, which made its way into Europe and Latin America by way of Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García and Parisian/Ecuadorian painter Manuel Rendón. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Tábara

Arbustos con imágenes blancas (Shrubs With White Images)
2016
Oil on canvas
100 x 100 cm
 Estudio Tábara Collection.

Paul Delvaux
(1897 - 1994)

Paul Delvaux was a Belgian painter noted for his dream-like scenes of women, classical architecture, trains and train stations, and skeletons, often in combination. He is often considered a surrealist, although he only briefly identified with the Surrealist movement. He was influenced by the works of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, but developed his own fantastical subjects and hyper-realistic styling, combining the detailed classical beauty of academic painting with the bizarre juxtapositions of surrealism.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Delvaux

The Viaduct
1963
Oil on canvas
100 x 130,8 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza
https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/delvaux-paul/viaduct

Jean Pierre Serrier
(1934 - 1989)
 

Jean Pierre Serrier was a French painter known for surrealism and absurdist art.
After graduating in 1955, he was drafted for military service, spent time in Germany and Morocco, and was sent to the front lines of the Algerian War. Thus he experienced war both as a child and as a young soldier, and returned
psychologically traumatized by the war in Algeria. This moral wound expressed itself in nightmares…The apocalyptic side of his [later] paintings would reflect his uneasiness and his unresolved traumas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Pierre_Serrier

 

Babel
1974
Oil on canvas
81,3 x 65,4 cm
Private collection
Sold by Christie’s 11 jan. 2017
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6054634

Colin Middleton
(1910 - 1983)

 

Colin Middleton MB was a Northern Irish landscape artist, figure painter, and surrealist. Middleton's prolific output in an eclectic variety of modernist styles is characterised by an intense inner vision, augmented by his lifelong interest in documenting the lives of ordinary people. He has been described as ‘Ireland's greatest surrealist.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Middleton

The Trojan Horse
1942
Oil on canvasboard
36 x 26cm
Private collection (sold at Adam’s December 08, 2021)
https://www.adams.ie/107888/Colin-Middleton-RHA-RUA-MBE-1910-1983-The-Trojan-Horse-1942-Oil-on-canvasboard-36-x-26cm-14-x-10%C2%BC-Signed-with-monogram-Exhibited-Belfast-Colin-Middleton-Belfast-Museum-and-Art-Gallery-1943-where-lent-by-Mrs-W-A-Wood-Alt-107888?artist_id=43&view=lot_detail

 Man Ray
(1890- 1976)
 

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Ray

Endgame
1946
oil on canvas
59,7 x 75 cm
Private collection

Méret Oppenheim
(1913 - 1985)

Meret (or Méret) Elisabeth Oppenheim was a German-born Swiss Surrealist artist and photographer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Méret_Oppenheim

Steinfrau (Stone Woman)
1938
Oil on cardboard
37 x 52 cm
Private collection
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5368

This painting draws directly from a photograph taken by the artist ManRay in 1933, elaborating on his figurelike arrangement of pebbles by partially emerging them in water, where they sprout legs clad in a pair of socks and Mary Jane shoes.

Erna Rosenstein
(1913 - 2004)

Polish surrealist, visual artist and poet.
Erna Rosenstein was one of the key figures of the Polish avant-garde. Over decades she developed her own autonomous language to rewrite post-war trauma and experiences from the edges of the Holocaust. She also reconfigured the oikos, transforming the private living space into an intimate workshop and an evolving installation. From the 1950s she incorporated waste and remnants, turning everyday objects and furniture into artworks, creating memory holders. Her diverse oeuvre includes paintings, drawings, assemblages, jewellery, artist’s books, and seven volumes of poetry, including Ślad [Trace, 1972]. E. Rosenstein questioned materialism and challenged the status of things in post-war reality. This was also emphasized in her poetic, precise titles, undermining the status of names.

https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/erna-rosenstein/

Rosnie (It is growing)
1956
Oil on canvas
48 x 64 cm.
Private collection
https://www.vip-hauserwirth.com/works/rosee96185/
https://post.moma.org/where-the-lightnings-have-their-palace-erna-rosenstein-and-global-surrealisms/

Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar
(1925 - 1966)
 

Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar (Arabic: عبد الهادي الجزار) was an Egyptian painter. He occupies a unique position among the artists of his generation. His membership in the Contemporary Art Group elevated his status as an artist through his utilization of social commentary in addition to the group's focus on traditional, Egyptian identity. This commentary is most widely recognized in his painting, The High Dam, in which he comments on the effects of modernization by the Egyptian government on society and their way of life. Since his death, his work has not ceased to challenge artists, intellectuals and critics both in Egypt and abroad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdel_Hadi_Al_Gazzar

The High Dam
1964
Oil on canvas
Location unknown
https://cloudflare.egyptindependent.com/disappearance-decades-old-memorial-painting-stirs-controversy/
https://momaa.org/icons-african-art/abdel-hadi-al-gazzar/

Raoof Haghighi
(b. 1976)

Raoof Haghighi is an Iranian-born British artist, known for his portraiture and realism. He was born in 1976 in Shiraz, Iran. His father was an artist and it was in Iran where he started to learn painting; he is a self taught artist. Since 1995, he has had many group and solo art exhibitions internationally, including in Iran, the United Kingdom, United States, Czech Republic, Spain, and Ireland.
In April 2023, Raoof will showcase his ‘surreal and hyperrealistic’ portraits and drawings at a London exhibit which he is dedicating to ‘all the brave women’ in Iran fighting for their freedom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoof_Haghighi

Think before you speak
Acrylic on kraft paper 
15x20cm
Private collection
https://www.instagram.com/raoof.h/

Roberto Matta
(1911 - 2002)

Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren better known as Roberto Matta, was one of Chile's best-known painters and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Matta

Three Figures
1958
Oil on burlap
139,7 x 188 cm
M.T. Abraham Center

 Ichiro Fukuzawa
(1898 - 1992)

Ichiro Fukuzawa was a Japanese modernist painter credited with the establishment of Surrealism in Japan's artistic communities during the early-1930s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichiro_Fukuzawa

Science Blinding Beauty
1930
Oil on canvas
130,3 x 162,1 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Takasaki, Japan

Kurt Seligmann

(1900 - 1962)

 

Kurt Leopold Seligmann was a Swiss-American Surrealist painter, engraver, and occultist He was known for his fantastic imagery of medieval troubadors and knights in macabre rituals and inspired by the carnival held annually in his native Basel, Switzerland. He was extremely influential within the Surrealist movement in Paris and particularly in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Seligmann

Vanity of the Ancestors

1940–43.

Oil on panel,

124,4 x 149,8 cm

Private Collection

   

Rita Kernn-Larsen
(1904 - 1998)

Rita Kernn-Larsen was a Danish surrealist painter. She was born to a wealthy family in Hillerød, and attended the private Marie Mørks School there. She began to paint at a young age, and after spending time abroad in Oslo, Norway, she attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts to fine-tune her craft, but found the teachings there to be too traditional. Instead, she moved to Paris and joined Fernand Léger's academy, studying under him until 1933, when she returned to Denmark and opened up her own studio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Kernn-Larsen

Self-Portrait (Know Thyself)
1937
Oil on canvas
40 x 45 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/works/self-portrait-know-thyself/

 Kikuji Yamashita
(1919 - 1986)
 

Kikuji Yamashita  was a Japanese Surrealist painter associated with the postwar avant-garde art movement in Japan. His artworks were featured prominently in the 2010 documentary film ANPO: Art X War by American documentary filmmaker Linda Hoaglund.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikuji_Yamashita

Sanmenso
 1973
Gouache on paper
36.4 x 26 cm
Private collection

Marion Adnams
(1898 - 1995)
 

Marion Elizabeth Adnams was an English painter, printmaker and draughtswoman. She is notable for her surrealist paintings, in which apparently unconnected objects appear together in unfamiliar, often outdoor, environments. Some of her paintings depict landscapes and landmarks close to, or within, her native town of Derby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Adnams

Aftermath
1946
Oil on panel
32x 23 cm
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/91977/aftermath

 Felix Labisse
(1905 - 1982)
 

Félix Labisse was a French Surrealist painter, illustrator, and designer. He was born in Marchiennes. He divided his time between Paris and the Belgian coast from 1927. In Ostend he met James Ensor, who influenced his work. Beginning in 1931 he designed for the theater. His paintings depict fantastical hybrid creatures, and are often erotic. He painted the first of a series of blue women in 1960; among them is the Bain Turquoise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Félix_Labisse

La Sainte Hermandad
1973
Lithographic print
Private collection

 Emmy Bridgwater
(1906 - 1999)

Emma Frith Bridgwater known as Emmy Bridgwater, was an English artist and poet associated with the Surrealist movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Bridgwater

Brave Morning
1942
Oil on canvas
Private collection

 

Emmy Bridgwater was a British surrealist whose career was cut short by family responsibilities. She did not discover surrealism until she was thirty and, just over a decade later, she had to abandon it. Out of the kindness of her heart, she devoted the rest of her active life to caring for relatives who could not look after themselves. The result is that her body of work is small and she is little known.

From The British Surrealists by Desmond Morris

 Pierre Bodo
(1953 - 2015)
 

Camille-Pierre Pambu Bodo, known as Bodo was a painter from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Pierre Bodo, born in Kinshasa, Belgian Congo, was one of the founders and key proponents with Moke and Chéri Samba of what has come to be known as the Zaïre school of popular painting.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_(painter)

 

Femme surchargée (Overworked Woman)
2005
Acrylic on canvas
82 x 101 cm
http://www.caacart.com/artiste/bodo-pierre/

 Desmond Morris
(b. 1928)
 

Desmond John Morris FLS hon. caus. (born 24 January 1928) is an English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter, as well as a popular author in human sociobiology. He is known for his 1967 book The Naked Ape, and for his television programmes such as Zoo Time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Morris

The Arena
1976
Oil on canvas
61 x 91 cm
Tate
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/morris-the-arena-t07646

 

The Arena is one of a series of paintings of about the same size, painted by Morris while living in Oxford in the 1970s. In these an assembly of what seem to be small abstract figures or microbes, which he called 'biomorphs', perform some unexplained ritual, often with some apparent sexual content. Here, a number of these figures appear to stand around in a circle, while others stand in the middle. Two figures may be in confrontation, like boxers in a ring, one (or maybe two) of them looking like two penises, painted bright red, while the other, which also might be two figures on top of each other, points a tall head, again looking like a penis. Morris painted this series without preliminary drawings, working on the canvas looking through a magnifying glass, and constructing the figures directly. The references are clearly to the sexual behaviour of imaginary micro-organisms that are comparable in an undefined way to some human routines.

 Dorothea Tanning
(1910 - 2012)
 

Dorothea Margaret Tanning was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Her early work was influenced by Surrealism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Tanning

 

A Very Happy Picture
1947
Oil on canvas
91,4 x 121,9 cm
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Wolfgang Paalen
(1905 - 1959)

 

Wolfgang Robert Paalen was an Austrian-Mexican painter, sculptor, and art philosopher. A member of the Abstraction-Création group from 1934 to 1935, he joined the influential Surrealist movement in 1935 and was one of its prominent exponents until 1942. Whilst in exile in Mexico, he founded his own counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN, in which he summarized his critical attitude towards radical subjectivism and Freudo-Marxism in Surrealism with his philosophy of contingency. He rejoined the group between 1951 and 1954, during his sojourn in Paris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Paalen

Les étrangers (The Strangers)
1937 

0il on canvas
Private collection, New York

Max Ernst
(1891 - 1976)

Max Ernst was a German (naturalised American in 1948 and French in 1958) painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ernst

The Eye of Silence

1944

Oil on canvas

110 cm × 143 cm

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri

 Ramses Younan
(1913 – 1966)

Ramses Younan (رمسيس يونان), was an Egyptian painter and writer. He work is most commonly associated with the Art and Liberty Group, a Cairo-based surrealist collective of artists, writers, intellectuals and activists with an anti-nationalist message.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramses_Younan

Untitled
1939
Oil on canvas
46,5 x 35,5
The MET
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/838540

Giorgio de Chirico
(1888 - 1978)

 

Giuseppe Maria Alberto Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His best-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace.
After 1919, he became a critic of modern art, studied traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico

Deux mannequins en buste (Two Half-length Mannequins)
Oil on canvas
50 x 40 cm
Private collection
Sold on 10 Apr 2022, Chaville, France.

Result: €380,000
https://www.gazette-drouot.com/en/article/giorgio-de-chirico-s-enigma/34416

 Igor Morski
(b. 1960)

Igor Morski is a Polish graphic designer, illustrator and set designer. Presently, he focuses on mixed media graphic art, based manly on photo manipulation, drawing, recently also 3D.
Igor Morski graduated with honors from the Interior Architecture and Industrial Design Faculty at the State Higher School of Fine Art in Poznań (now the University of Arts). In the late 80’s and early 90’s he worked for public broadcasting company Polish Television creating set design for TV theatre, culture and commentary shows.


https://www.instagram.com/igormorskigallery/

 

 

 Victor Brauner
(1903 - 1966)

 

Victor Brauner was a Romanian painter and sculptor of the surrealist movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Brauner

The Surrealist
1947
Oil on canvas
60 x 45 cm
Guggenheim N.Y.
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/681

 

In The Surrealist Victor Brauner borrows motifs from the tarot to create a portrait of himself as a young man. The tarot, a set of seventy-eight illustrated cards used in fortune telling, was a subject of widespread interest to Brauner and other Surrealists. Four of these cards, for example, appeared on André Derain’s cover for the December 1933 issue of Minotaure. A group including Brauner even produced a deck of cards in 1940–41 that was probably a tarot. One tarot card, the Juggler (the first card in the Marseille tarot deck), provided Brauner with a key prototype for his self-portrait: the Surrealist’s large hat, medieval costume, and the position of his arms all derive from this figure who, like Brauner’s subject, stands behind a table displaying a knife, a goblet, and coins.¹ The tarot Juggler appropriately symbolizes the creativity of the Surrealist poet, for it refers to the capacity of each individual to create his own personality through intelligence, wit, and initiative, and thus to play with his own future, as the juggler manipulates his baton.

René Magritte
(1898 - 1967)

 

René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Magritte

The Empire of Light, II
1950
Oil on canvas
78,8 x 99,1 cm
MoMA
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78456

The Empire of Light (French: L'Empire des lumières) is the title of a succession of paintings by René Magritte. They depict the paradoxical image of a nocturnal landscape beneath a sunlit sky. He explored the theme in 27 paintings (17 oil paintings and 10 gouaches) from the 1940s to the 1960s. The paintings were not planned as a formal series. They have never all been exhibited together and are rarely exhibited in smaller groups. The original French title, L'Empire des Lumieres is sometimes translated as singular, The Empire of Light, and sometimes as plural The Empire of Lights. Other translations include The Dominion of Light: making the distinction: "an empire exists in relation to a ruler, a dominion does not necessarily require this.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empire_of_Light