FRIEZE MASTERS 2018

 For Frieze Masters 2018, Bruce Silverstein Gallery would be pleased to present a selection of photographic masterpieces from the twentieth century created in the spirit of Dada and Surrealism.

Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column, 1926; René Magritte's Variante de la photographie connue sous le titre 'Dieu, le huitième jour', 1937; and Man Ray’s L’enigme d’Isidore Ducasse, 1920, each illustrate the artist's representational approach in their endeavors to imbue reality with the haze of the dream state. Often re-contextualizing ordinary objects to communicate their mythic qualities, these behemoth artists tantalize and distort reality, evoking an ever-evolving sense of mystery and intrigue.  As established artists fundamentally drawn to working with the photographic medium, their unique pictorial visions render these formal contributions remarkably innovative to this day.  

Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; however, Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the rationalism that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. André Breton, poet, critic and leader of the movement who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, described Surrealism as a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.”

Frederick Sommer’s The Giant (Photo-Object), 1946 reflects a Dadaist sensibility in the artist's embrace of the chance element; the anthropomorphic end result seemingly born out of a lively game of exquisite corpse.  Los Obstaculos, 1929 by Manuel Alvarez Bravo breathes life into stagnant carrousel horses, the figures begging to be set free to roam wild.  Like Alvarez Bravo, much has been written on the Surrealist undertones in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész, and these attributes are central in both Hyeres, France, 1932 by the former and the poetic polaroid images by the latter Hungarian master.  The sensation of movement often captured in Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moments', recall the unconscious realm of the dream, in similar fashion as the frenetic series of New York street scenes by Lisette Model made in the late 1930s-early 1940s, such as Reflection, 1939-1945.  An influential teacher and photographer, Model was once quoted as saying, 'If you are on the same level, you lose many things'.  
 
Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by writers and artists alike.