Japanese, 20th century, male.
Born 1900, in Tokyo.
Painter.
Kongo Abe spent time in France when Surrealism was emerging. The movement had a great influence on him and he introduced Surrealist ideas to Japan on his return.
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Belgian, 20th century, male.
Born 1918, in Damprémy.
Painter. Designs for jewellery.
Rémi van den Abeele studied at the academy of fine art in Mons. In the Belgian Surrealist circle centring around the painters Magritte and Delvaux, the poet Mesens, and many other artists, Van den Abeele went practically unnoticed until the 1960s. His Surrealism arises from unexpected juxtapositions of different objects, based on the method used by the poet Lautréamont, the objects being painted in ...
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British, 20th century, female.
Born 1 December 1904, in Buenos Aires, to a Scottish father and an American mother; died 17 November 1991, in London.
Painter, collage artist.
Surrealism.
London Group, English Surrealist Group.
Eileen Agar trained initially under Leon Underwood, and subsequently under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art in London until 1926. Although flirting with Post-Impressionist techniques fashionable at that time, early works such as her ...
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Whitney Chadwick
(b Buenos Aires, Dec 1, 1899; d London, Nov 17, 1991).
English painter of Argentine birth. She arrived in England in 1906; in 1924 she studied with Leon Underwood (1890–1975), and she attended the Slade School of Fine Art, London, from 1925 to 1926; she also studied art in Paris from 1928 to 1930. She was a member of the London Group from 1933, and her work was selected by Roland Penrose and Herbert Read for the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London, in 1936. Agar exhibited with the Surrealists both in England and abroad. From 1936 she experimented with automatic techniques and new materials, taking photographs and making collages and objects, for example The Angel of Anarchy (fabric over plaster and mixed media, 1936–40; London, Tate). By the 1960s she was producing Tachist paintings with Surrealist elements.
with A. Lambirth: A Look at My Life (London, 1988) Eileen Agar: Retrospective Exhibition (exh. cat., London, Commonwealth Inst., 1971)...Article
Beninese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1964.
Painter (mixed media).
Simplice Ahouansou is self-taught. In a manner that shows affinities with Surrealism, some of his paintings comment with irony on certain aspects of modern Western civilisation, such as communication, or protection of private property, while other works seem more firmly anchored in the artistic traditions of his native country of Benin....
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Argentinian, 20th century, male.
Born 1928.
Painter. Scenes with figures.
A follower of the Surrealist painter, Juán Battle Planas, Aizenberg took up experiments in collage undertaken by Max Ernst. He created small pictures that present minuscule figures contemplating the dusk from high terraces in unknown towns in vast landscapes with infinite horizons. He used grey or gilt tonalities, which makes his canvases more intimate and secret....
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Horacio Safons
(b Federal, Entre Ríos, Aug 22, 1928; d Buenos Aires, Feb 19, 1996).
Argentine painter, draftsman, and collagist. He studied under Juan Batlle Planas from 1950 to 1953 and quickly established the terms of his work, rooted ideologically in Surrealism and indebted in particular to the work of René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. All the elements of his mature art are evident in an early painting, Burning of the Hasidic School in Minsk in 1713 (1954; artist’s col.): architecture, space, light, and ordered series. He developed an essentially intellectual approach, working in a variety of media (paintings, drawings, gouaches, and collages) in rigorous sequences and picturing objects in cold impersonal light that confers on them a sense of distant majesty. The most common motif is that of a geometric, almost abstract, structure, often in the form of a tower pierced by rows of large plain windows. Aizenberg’s work, while far removed from the Surrealist presumption of achieving a synthesis of wakefulness and dream, acquires its strength through the ordering of the unreal and the strange in the search for a transcendent essence capable of perturbing and jolting the viewer by bringing into play the archetypes of silence and solitude....
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Belgian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1948, in Antwerp.
Painter, watercolourist, graphic designer. Figures.
Roger van Akelyn evokes the anguish inherent in the human condition, sometimes using quasi-surrealist imagery.
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Italian, 20th century, male.
Born 1927, in Turin.
Painter.
Lorenzo Alessandri, noted for his depictions of scenes of atrocities, was a member of the Surrealist movement.
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Italian, 20th century, male.
Born in Turin.
Painter.
Enrico Alimandi trained only in painting. He stayed in Paris in 1928 and was a member of the Futurist movement from 1929 to 1932. He then became interested in Surrealism. He had solo exhibitions of his paintings in Turin (...
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Brazilian, 20th century, male.
Born 1914; died 1972.
Painter.
Oswald de Andrade was probably the son of the writer and art theorist, Mario de Andrade. His art, which reveals Surrealist lyricism and folkloric fantasy, has been likened to that of Chagall.
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Hungarian, 20th century, female.
Born 1913; died 1991.
Painter. Figure compositions.
Symbolism.
European School group.
The wife of Imre Amos, an important representative of the Surrealist trend in Hungary, Margit Anna had virtually the same career in her own painting. In her youth her paintings were in the Post-Impressionist tradition. Chagall's work influenced her with his poetry, linking the memory of childhood and the creation of fantasy. The search for childhood innocence prevails over the inspiration of fantasy, perhaps because the Surrealist model had faded for her with the death of her husband in ...
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Portuguese, 20th century, male.
Born 1934; died 1978.
Painter.
Conceptual Art.
Compared with other Portuguese artists, Antonio Areal was relatively isolated. After a period in which his work was Informel, yet close to the experiments in Surrealism, he wrote an important work on Conceptual Art....
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Chilean, 20th century, male.
Born 1913, in La Serena.
Painter.
A painter and a poet, Arénas took part in two Surrealist exhibitions that he organised himself in 1941 and 1948.
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Belgian, 20th century, male.
Born 1928, in Braine-le-Comte; died 1974.
Painter.
Marcel Arnould was self-taught and at first painted Surrealist-style abstract pictures. He became a member of the
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American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1963.
Painter, draughtsman, collage artist, illustrator.
David Aronson, drawn to occultism, paints Surrealistically absurd images, which are sometimes frightening or disturbing. He has produced a set of paintings on the subject of the Holocaust. He also illustrates works for young readers....
Article
Greta Stroeh
[Jean] (Peter Wilhelm)
(b Strassburg, Germany [now Strasbourg, France], Sept 16, 1886; d Basle, Switzerland, June 7, 1966).
French sculptor, painter, collagist, printmaker, and poet of German birth. The son of a German father and French Alsatian mother, he developed a cosmopolitan outlook from an early age and as a mature artist maintained close contact with the avant-garde throughout Europe. He was a pioneer of abstract art and one of the founders of Dada in Zurich, but he also participated actively in both Surrealism and Constructivism. While he prefigured junk art and the Fluxus movement in his incorporation of waste material, it was through his investigation of biomorphism and of chance and accident that he proved especially influential on later 20th-century art in liberating unconscious creative forces.
Following a brief period at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Strasbourg (1900–01), Arp received instruction from 1901 from a friend and neighbour, the painter and printmaker Georges Ritleng (1875–1972). He then attended the Kunstschule in Weimar (1904–7) and the Académie Julian in Paris (...
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French, 20th century, male.
Born 16 September 1886, in Strasbourg; died 7 June 1966, in Basel.
Collage artist, engraver, sculptor, draughtsman, illustrator, poet.
Dadaism.
Der Moderne Bund, Dadaist groups in Zurich and Cologne, Artistes Radicaux, Das Neue Leben, Paris Surrealist Group, Abstraction-Création.
Hans Arp joined the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg in 1902, at the age of 16. In 1903 he began painting and contributed to a local magazine. In 1904 he made his first trip to Paris. From 1905 to 1907 he studied under Ludwig von Hoffmann at the fine arts academy in Weimar, where he attended modern art exhibitions. He returned to Strasbourg, which his family then left for Weggis, on the edge of the Lac des Quatre Cantons in Switzerland. Between 1908 and 1910 he made a second trip to Paris and worked for a time at the Académie Julian. In Weggis he completed his first Abstract compositions and learned the art of modelling. In 1911 he co-founded the group...
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French, 20th century, male.
Born 25 March 1899, in Antibes; died 10 July 1965, in Paris.
Painter, draughtsman.
A skilful draughtsman, Jacques Audiberti always represented in his graphic works a world teeming with references to Surrealist and Fantastic sources.
In 1999 the Galerie Belfond in Paris showed an important collection of the graphic works of Audiberti, writer, poet and playwright....
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Portuguese, 20th century, male.
Born 1923, in Oporto.
Painter.
Portuguese Surrealist group.
Fernando Azevedo graduated from the School of Decorative Arts and showed his work at an exhibition for the first time in 1947. As a member of the Portuguese Surrealist group, he participated in exhibitions in Lisbon in ...
