Magritte

Biography

René Magritte, (1898-1967) was a famous Belgian Surrealist. Whilst working as a commercial artist early on in his career he developed his signature techniques. In 1927 he moved from Brussels to Paris to join the Parisian Surrealists.  Magritte began his investigation of pictorial language in a burst of activity that was to produce sixty pictures in one year, some of them, quite large.  When he left Paris in 1930, he abandoned the Surrealist environment and he returned to Brussels where he was regarded as the center of the avant-garde circle. He mostly remained in Belgium until his death in 1967 Magritte's works are conceived of as riddles. He explores the mysteries lurking in the unexpected opposition of everyday things, involving the viewer in a self-induced disorientation. In his paintings everything is visible; he doesn’t involve the use of symbolism or myths. Magritte worked from several sources which he repeated with different variations - anatomical surprises, such as the hand whose wrist is a woman's face, the mysterious opening, where a door swings open onto an unexpected vista; metamorphic creatures, such as a stone bird flying above a rocky shoreline. He animates the inanimate, as a shoe with toes; he enlarges details, as an immense apple filling a room. He makes an association of complementariness, as the leaf-bird, or the mountain-eagle. His titles accompany the paintings in the way that names correspond to objects, without either illustrating or explaining them.