Festival
VISUAL ART For more info go to LIST.CO.UK /FESTIVAL
SURREAL ENCOUNTERS: COLLECTING THE MARVELLOUS One of the most important shows of surrealist art presented in Britain
When you enter Surreal Encounters, the big summer show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the i rst thing you see is the resource room (isn’t that normally at the end?) closely followed by ‘Room 3’. Well, this is surrealism, you didn’t expect it to make sense, did you? It does take time to i nd your feet in this
exhibition because the curators are trying to do two quite distinct things: to tell the story of four major collectors of surrealist art, and to create a survey exhibition of the movement itself. They’re not helped by the fact that surrealism is hardly linear, and that artists regularly joined, left and l irted with its margins. There’s a room devoted to Gabrielle Keiller, a former goli ng champion who married into the Keiller marmalade dynasty and left her important collection of surrealist art to the National Galleries of Scotland when she died in 1995, next to one about the inl uence of Giorgio de Chirico and a corridor devoted to Dada. But in the three large interconnecting rooms on the ground l oor of Modern One, Surreal Encounters really hits its stride.
Devoted to exploring the various directions taken by the movement in the 1930s, these galleries include major works by all the big hitters: Dalí, Magritte, Picasso, Ernst, Tanguy. The Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips Sofa are here (complete with Dalí’s original sketches for it, on the back of an envelope), but it is the paintings which dazzle again and again. You realise, rather belatedly, that this is one of the most signii cant shows of surrealist art mounted in Britain in recent times.
It’s densely packed, full of documentary material as well as art, with collectors as colourful as the artists they patronised. It’s also full of surprises, from major works rarely exhibited to lesser known names, and it reminds us how radical surrealism was, rooted in the 1930s but still relevant in artistic terms today. You emerge from it all a little dazed, having been immersed in a strange and at times confusing world, but one which still has the power to dazzle and amaze. (Susan Mansi eld) ■ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), 624 6200, until 11 Sep, £10 (£8). ●●●●●
4–11 Aug 2016 THE LIST FESTIVAL 103