Temporary Exhibition

Surrealism and the Dream

Surrealism was not just another artistic movement but an attitude to life that has left a profound mark on all subsequent artistic creation. For the first time this exhibition will reveal how this transformation of modern sensibility had its roots in the profound connection between dream and image in Surrealism. Paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and photographs by artists such as André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, André Masson, Max Ernst, Jean Arp, Claude Cahun and Paul Nougé will be used to construct an overview of this fascinating relationship proposed by the curator José Jiménez, to which little attention has been given in art-historical studies. From the outset, the Surrealists championed the dream together with automatic writing, seeing them as fundamental routes towards the liberation of the psyche. While Freud’s thinking, in particular his great work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), was crucial for the Surrealists’ own approach to the world of dreams, they were more than mere followers of his ideas. For them, the dream was a field of experience different to that of conscious life, and knowledge of it was essential for the enrichment and expansion of the psyche.