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Report: France - Art

Last chance to see Pompidou's Surrealism and the Object show

Besides its fascinating permanent collection, Paris’s Pompidou Centre offers a consistently challenging choice of modern art exhibitions. In January 2014 you can see a show on Surrealism and its apparently inevitable encounter with reality.

Alberto Giacometti's  Boule suspendue photographed at the show by Georges Meguerditchian
Alberto Giacometti's Boule suspendue photographed at the show by Georges Meguerditchian Centre Pompidou RMN GPSuccession Giacometti/Adagp
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In a closed gallery, high in the Centre Pompidou, Didier Ottinger, vice-president of the famous culture centre, has curated an exhibition which wraps itself around you as you enter into a cosy, softly lit space.

Surrealism and the Object is its title.

That's something of a contradiction. Surrealism as a concept had everything to do with what goes on in the mind and not what materialised.

But, as Ottinger explains, when the movement's leaders, André Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, became involved in politics in 1927 the ideas in their manifesto sought a way to take shape.

“In the late 1920s suddenly they were faced with people asking them to deal with the real,” he says. “The solution appeared when they discovered the Boule suspendu [Suspended ball] by Giacometti. This was the first Surrealist object,” explains Didier Ottinger.

And as revolutionary as the Surrealists set out to be, they eventually adopted leitmotivs or leitmotivs adopted them.

Two of them are represented in the exhibition.

“The first one is the objet trouvé – the found object – invented by Marcel Duchamp in 1940, the second is the mannequin which also appeared in the painting of Giorgio di Chirico in the same year… apparently the imagination of the Surrealists moved from one to another.”

Surrealism and the Object also shows how it became important for surrealist artists to have their works on show just like other artists. The first international Surrealism exhibition was in 1948. It’s the backbone of the exhibition at the Pompidou centre.

Or rather the main street. Shafts of coloured light beam the names of invented streets used in the 1948 exhibition onto the floor of the gallery.

On the sides hang photographic works by Cindy Sherman or Paul McCarthy - mannequins again! - or a concept by Mark Dion. His work Package was commissioned for the exhibition. It's an arrangement of small wrapped packages sent by post to Didier Ottinger, who was instructed not to open them. They are stacked inside a glass showcase.

“It was difficult to choose the artists,” Ottinger says. “Eighty per cent of living artists could have been part of the show. The ideas and the process invented by the surrealists around the object are now everywhere in the field of contemporary art.”

Whether for the surprises or for the beauty of Giacometti's pure interacting wooden shapes or for another take on surrealist art, its origins and role in our lives there's something to be gleaned here, surreally.

Surrealism and the Object until 3 March 2014 at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

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