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