The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium are opening IMAGINE!, an exceptional international traveling exhibition conceived in close collaboration with the Centre Pompidou (Paris). An immersion in surrealist poetry, the dream, the labyrinth, metamorphosis, the unknown and the subconscious, led by the great names of surrealism, from Max Ernst to Giorgio de Chirico, not forgetting Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Jane Graverol, Dorothea Tanning, Man Ray, Leonor Fini, etc.
Each partner museum will host the core of the traveling exhibition and enrich it by highlighting its own heritage. In Brussels, the RMFAB will explore Surrealism from a Symbolist perspective through more than 130 works of art (paintings, works on paper, sculptures, objects, assemblages and photographs).
IMAGINE! focuses on the connections and similarities, but also on the fault lines between Surrealism and Symbolism, one of its precursors. From 1880 onwards, Brussels was an exceptional center of art and the avant-garde, as the exhibitions of groups such as "Les XX" and "La Libre Esthétique" show. Symbolism, embodied in particular by Rops, Spilliaert, Khnopff, Delville and Minne, developed rapidly in Brussels and largely anticipated the emergence of the Surrealist movement. A few decades later, Brussels became a center of Belgian surrealism. Despite the cultural rupture caused by the First World War, the older Symbolists and the emerging youth were never fundamentally estranged from each other.
Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, exhibition "IMAGINE!" Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium
From January to July 2024, Belgium will hold the Presidency of the Council of the European Union. What better year to celebrate Surrealism, the movement that put Belgium on the map and found meaning in a European context? Moreover, 2024 marks the centenary of the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto (1924). With IMAGINE!, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium want to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Surrealism in an optimal European context. After Brussels and Paris, the exhibition will be shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Fundación Mapfré Madrid before ending at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
February 21 to July 21, 2024
