Surrealism Beyond Borders

exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Surrealism Beyond Borders was an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring surrealist and surrealist-inspired art movements from around the world. The exhibition eschews a typical chronological format, instead allowing visitors to wander between different cultural and political moments, often including juxtapositions between different artworks from around the world. I often struggle with blockbuster exhibitions because I find the scale overwhelming, but I found that the breadth and scope of Surrealism Beyond Borders to be successful and exciting, rather than exhausting. The curators did an excellent job in drawing out the inherently political nature of Surrealism in a variety of cultural contexts. Sometimes, shows that look at modern art movements in non-Western contexts relegate non-Western artists to imitators or define their artistic production in terms of the West, so I appreciated how the exhibition granted artists from across different cultures the same agency, and actively worked against the “center-periphery” model that characterizes older art history.

Posted on:
January 1, 0001
Length:
1 minute read, 156 words
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