With RENDEZVOUS DER TRÄUME, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting a comprehensive exhibition on international Surrealism to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of this movement, tracing German Romanticism as one of Surrealism's most important kindred spirits.
Starting with a pair of paintings from the Kunsthalle that are being thematized for the first time, over 230 surrealist icons by great and newly discovered surrealists such as Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, René Magritte, André Masson, Salvador Dalí, Dorothea Tanning, Paul Klee, Valentine Hugo, Victor Brauner, Toyen and many others are juxtaposed with over 70 masterpieces of German Romanticism, including works by Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, as well as Romantic poetry in novel contexts and exciting juxtapositions.
After all, key themes such as the German Romantic artists'and poets' fascination with dreams - understood as a higher kind of seeing -, the power of imagination, the night, but also with the microcosm and macrocosm or a special feeling for nature were among the sources of inspiration that Surrealism adopted a century later. The intellectual attitudes and pictorial inventions of Friedrich, Runge, Carl Gustav Carus, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe and many others played an important role in the search for revolutionary art in the 20th century, as did the writings of Novalis, Achim and Bettine v. Arnim, Karoline v. Günderrode, Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin and Heinrich v. Kleist. Surprisingly, this was especially true during the years of war, resistance and exile.
René Magritte, La malédiction, 1931 © Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
Surrealism followed on from Romanticism as a reaction against the "disenchantment of the world" and reflected its revolutionary dimension; the aim of both movements was an attitude to life, the questioning of an apparently given reality and its limits and thus nothing less than a transformation of both the individual and society. Although born out of different historical situations, Novalis' credo of the "romanticization of the world" seems to anticipate the group's striving for a higher spiritual revolt in a "surreality".
June 13 to October 12, 2025
