The Menil Collection, Houston, TX
February 2020
February 5–November 29, 2020 Photography and the Surreal Imagination (2020) presents the wide reach of the surreal imagination in modern and contemporary photography. Anchored in historical surrealism, this exhibition explores the central tension in photography between documentation and invention, a generative force for artists connected to that movement. The artists brought together here produced images that teeter between truth and suggestion, reality and its invented double. Drawn from the Menil’s holdings and Houston-based collections, the exhibition demonstrates how this vision of photography continues to hold sway and how artists have used the camera to reshape, question, and disturb the way we see the world. The presentation begins with an examination of the transformation of the everyday through the lens of a tradition that recasts the world as an enigmatic theater, from Eugène Atget’s shots of “Old Paris” to the arresting sensitivity of Roy DeCarava’s archives of Black America. Photographs in the exhibition also foreground the exploration of the body, including Hans Bellmer’s images of deconstructed dolls and Cindy Sherman’s cinematographic self-staging, among other depictions of costumed, distorted, fragmented figures. Lastly, the show considers the manipulation of the image, highlighting artists from Man Ray to Lorna Simpson, who turned the photographic surface into a collision of pictorial fragments that question the nature of representation. Photography and the Surreal Imagination is curated by Natalie Dupêcher, Assistant Curator of Modern Art, and will coincide with the FotoFest Biennial 2020. It will be installed adjacent to the Menil’s Surrealism galleries. Learn more at The Menil Collection.