Surrealism: Le Grand Jeu

In 1924, the first manifesto of Surrealism was published in Paris, laying the foundation for a revolution in art whose effects can still be felt today. To mark this centennial, in 2024 the three museums making up Plateforme 10 are joining in the festivities by offering a Surrealist Season, an expanded collective reflection on one of the most significant art movements of the 20th century. On this occasion, the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne presents its first thematic exhibition devoted to Surrealism since 1987 and examines its unprecedented topicality through the lens of play.

Initially an informal activity that served as the glue holding together Surrealist sociability, play crystallised the birth of a collective mindset defined by a reversal of traditional values, putting the old rules in the dock and inventing new ways of making art.

Bringing together over sixty historical and contemporary artists, the exhibition borrows its title from a review published in the late 1920s by a splinter group of young French Surrealists who refused to rally behind André Breton. This conflict was symptomatic of the movement, which fractured and reconfigured itself according to the passions, frictions, and friendships of the moment, making each artist by turns an adherent and a rebel.

The first part of the exhibition, featuring a historical overview, focuses on multiple aspects of play, as much recreational as subversive or critical. It points up the extent to which play was both a way of being in the world and a means of negotiating between reality and the imagination, the communicable and the incommunicable. Play represents a space of liberty bound by certain constraints, and in that space the exhibition aims above all to measure the creative exaltation that the Surrealists put to artistic use.

The second part of the exhibition features eight contemporary artists who carry on the burst of creative energies coming from the Surrealists’ anarchistic spirit, which upended our way of imaging the body, language, and objects. In their work, these artists reaffirm both their mistrust of language and their faith in the omnipotence of stories, express their fascination with the fine line separating the visible and the invisible, and celebrate the presence of eroticism everywhere.

While Surrealism proclaimed itself revolutionary from the outset, the movement gradually moulded our collective imagination to the point of making its way into our everyday vocabulary. ‘It’s surreal’ can be said about what astonishes us and what goes beyond our understanding. This exhibition offers the unique chance to gauge Surrealism’s continuing influence on and importance to our way of perceiving the world around us.

Curated by
Juri Steiner, Director, MCBA and Pierre­-Henri Foulon, Curator of Contemporary Art, MCBA

Publication
Pierre-Henri Foulon, Juri Steiner (ed.), Surréalisme. Le Grand Jeu, with texts by Paolo Baggi, Gorge Bataille, Boris Bergmann, Pierre-Henri Foulon, Susan Laxton and Juri Steiner (French), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne & Scheidegger&Spiess, Zürich, 2024.

Order at the MCBA Book-and Giftshop: shop.mcba@plateforme10.ch

Information on the full public program can be found here.
For press and images visit mcba.ch.