A Surreal Shock - Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

"We are proud to collaborate with Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which has one of the world's most important collections of Surrealist works. With this collaboration, we have the pleasure of giving our visitors here in Aarhus the opportunity to experience magnificent Surrealist works and to explore first-hand the fantastic, automatic, and subconscious experiments of Surrealism to challenge the status quo."

– Rebecca Matthews, Museum Director at ARoS

In dialogue with the Danish Surrealists

Importantly, the exhibition at ARoS features several significant works by Danish Surrealists from ARoS' celebrated collection and other lenders across Denmark. Artists such as Rita Kernn-Larsen, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen, and Wilhelm Freddie create a close and rarely seen dialogue with some of their international contemporaries. The juxtaposition allows visitors to see the many similarities, but also some of the differences between the Danish and international Surrealist movement.

Free expression of the individual

Surrealism's desire for a revolution, not only of the mind, but also of society to make room for the free expression of the individual is exhibited in a variety of expressions ranging from painting, sculpture, collage, and assemblage, to books, prints, drawings, photography, and film. The works in the exhibition are highly varied in use of materials, technique, and style, reflecting the different Surrealists’ working methods and ideas; instead of adopting a single comprehensive style of their own, the artists pursued a new kind of beauty that they found in their dreams and the subconscious. Visitors will experience first-hand the fantastic, automatic, subconscious, and linguistic experiments of the Surrealists to provoke and undermine the rational principles of society. 

Last stop worldwide tour Surrealists from Boijmans

ARoS is the last stop in the worldwide tour of the Surrealist collection, after this venue the collection returns to Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Until now almost 457.000 visitors saw the touring exhibition which started in Wellington, New Zealand in the summer of 2021, and has travelled to Seoul, Mexico City and Milan since. ‘A Surreal Shock - Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’ will be on view in ARoS, Aarhus, from 7 October until 21 January 2024.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – the Surrealism museum in the Netherlands

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has an extensive collection of Surrealist art, which first paintings – Au seuil de la liberté by Magritte and Le couple by Max Ernst – were acquired in 1966. While the other Dutch museums concentrated on the cool modernism of Northern Europe, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen turned its attention to the developments in the southern cities of Brussels, Paris and Madrid. The museum organized exhibitions of works by Man Ray and René Magritte and in 1970 Salvador Dalí’s first European retrospective opened in Rotterdam.

The Surrealist collection now comprises more than 125 paintings and sculptures plus a collection of rare books and publications, which attracts art lovers from all over the world. Several iconic works from this collection were originally owned by the excentric British collector Edward James, who for several years was a patron of Dalí as well as Magritte. He is portrayed in the famous painting La reproduction interdite, which will be on show in the exhibition in ARoS.

Collaboration

The exhibition is curated in collaboration with ARoS museum.