MEXICO CITY.- The Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes is presenting the exhibition about the Belgian painter René Magritte to be held from March 17 through July 11, 2010. The main purpose is to display for the first time in Latin America the work of such a unique artist.
Being a landmark in the heart of Mexico City, the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes has been standing since 1934 as the greatest forum of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) housing the celebrated masterworks of the muralists —Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo.
The work of René Magritte and its association with surrealism would allow the public to explore one of the core tendencies underlying Mexican art and culture of the first half o the twentieth century.
The exhibition includes 150 objects —paintings, drawings, etchings together with photographs, films and documents about his life and work, in order to offer a view of the artist’s career that spans from 1925 to 1967. The works come from 34 museums, galleries and private collections from 9 different countries. The Curatorial committee is integrated by Roxana Velásquez and Sandra Benito, from Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, with the support of the Magritte Foundation and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique-Magritte Museum.
In the first gallery, the different artistic proposals developed by Magritte on the 20’s and 30’s, are displayed in order to illustrate his initial pursuits towards a personal style, inspired by the avant-garde and the early Surrealism. This section also includes some of the jobs carried out as illustrator and the groundbreaking text “Words and Images” published in the 1929 magazine La Révolution Surrealiste. In the second gallery, the analysis of objects and their representation reveals the typical queries he would explore from that moment on. This part covers until the 1940’s when Magritte overtake radical changes in his production, known as “Surrealisme au plein soleil”, as a result of the disenchantment brought about by the post-war period. Finally, the third and fourth galleries exhibit works executed during the last decades of this career, when the artist ponders about the impossibility of mimetic representation, while exposing the nonsense of the real world.
The tour also embraces photography through a selection of 55 pictures where the artist’s intimate environment are revealed, as well as images that show him painting and surrounded by the members of his surrealists colleagues in Belgium. Also, this group of photographs encompass portraits shoot by photographers of his acquaintance and those stills from the movie Magritte ou la leçon des choses de Luc de Heusch (1959).
The exhibition tour features a gallery named “Espacio lúdico” addressed to youngsters and children who can approach his work through games and interactive activities. In this gallery, visitors get involved with the aesthetic ideas of the artist, in an enjoyable way.
The uniqueness of Magritte’s work in world art history, turns this exhibition into a distinctive opportunity to appreciate a surprising way of painting that has significantly influenced the art of the XXth century.
A hard-bound catalogue has been published containing color reproductions of all the works exhibited. The texts were written by scholars Pierre Sterckx, Nicole Everaert-Desmedt and Teresa del Conde, Claude Goormans and Michel Draguet.
