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Bordering the Real: Surrealist photographs

Past exhibition
18 February - 30 April 2022
  • Overview
  • Works
  • Press
  • Installation Views
  • Press release
Overview
Pierre Boucher, Dadès, 1936
Pierre Boucher, Dadès, 1936

Les Douches la Galerie is pleased to present Bordering the Real, a group show exploring the importance of the photographic medium in surrealist practices from the late 1920s to the 1950s. 

Featuring the work of 12 artists, the exhibition gathers some 40 photographic prints that reflect on the uncanny in a fragmented figure, a simple object or a lost landscape.

 

Featuring works by:
Denise Bellon, Ruth Bernhard, Pierre Boucher, Marc Foucault, Philippe Halsman, Lucien Lorelle, Pierre Molinier, Jean Painlevé, Willy Ronis, André Steiner, Val Telberg and Raoul Ubac

  • Dossier de presse
  • Press Kit
Works
  • Denise Bellon, Natures mortes, poupées, c. 1930-1940
    Denise Bellon, Natures mortes, poupées, c. 1930-1940
  • Pierre Boucher, Sans titre, 1932
    Pierre Boucher, Sans titre, 1932
  • Pierre Boucher, Dadès, 1936
    Pierre Boucher, Dadès, 1936
  • Lucien Lorelle, Femme en lévitation, 1947
    Lucien Lorelle, Femme en lévitation, 1947
  • Jean Painlevé et Eli Lotar, Pince de Homard, 1929
    Jean Painlevé et Eli Lotar, Pince de Homard, 1929
  • André Steiner, Anamorphose, c. 1938
    André Steiner, Anamorphose, c. 1938
  • Val Telberg, Cataclysms series, c. 1952
    Val Telberg, Cataclysms series, c. 1952
  • Val Telberg, Untitled (Salvador Dali), n.d.
    Val Telberg, Untitled (Salvador Dali), n.d.
  • Raoul Ubac, Combat des Penthésilées, 1939
    Raoul Ubac, Combat des Penthésilées, 1939
Press
  • Fortes impressions

    Télérama, 23 March 2022
    This link opens in a new tab.
  • Aux Douches Galerie, deux valent mieux qu'une

    Julien Hory, Fisheye, 10 March 2022
  • Aux frontières du réel

    Télérama Sortir, 8 March 2022
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  • Photos surréalistes, cocktails, nouveau Mob house... Une semaine pleine de surprises

    Sophie de Santis, Le Figaro, 1 March 2022
Installation Views
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 06
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 05
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 04
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 02
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 09
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 07
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 08
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 11
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 10
  • Aux Frontie Res Du Re El Les Douches La Galerie 2022 12
Press release

Bordering the Real

Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, Paris 1924

 

‘Photography is one of the enigmas that sprang up on surrealism’s path’, declared the authors of the introduction to the catalogue for La Subversion des images [The Subversion of Images][1], the vast exhibition staged at the Centre Pompidou in 2009 to encompass the entire field of images (photography and film) from the artistic trend born in the 1920s which has long influenced the creative arts within France and beyond.

It is an enigma for there are no theoretical writings on photographic images in the entire surrealist oeuvre despite the fact that the movement influenced the work of some of the most eminent photographers such as Man Ray, Raoul Ubac and Hans Bellmer.

There was no official surrealist photographer[2] (apart from Jacques André Boiffard), but the surrealists used photography in all its forms and in complete freedom in the movement’s revues, books and artistic production. It became so familiar to them that they did not bother to theorise about it. In his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André Breton only afforded images a few lines of text[3]. 

Surrealism and photography are ‘an illegitimate and unpredictable couple… because at that time, photography claimed the crudest form of realism… while surrealism clung to pure psychic automatism, dreams and the magical’[4]. The images that were made are very diverse, ranging from photomontage and double exposure to seemingly ordinary shots that ‘reveal the magical happenstance of urban wanderings’[5]. Some overpower reality or exude a transgressive, subversive power. 

The stylistic definition of surrealist photography takes after the explosiveness and diversity of individual practises, since it involves constantly renewed experimentation. Photography is in the service of the imagination freed from established categories (nudes, still lifes, reportage, etc.). It finds its definition through the effects it produces on the viewer.

‘Surrealist photography’ makes visible what lies beyond the real; it is a ferryman, giving access to the world of the subconscious and of dreams. An image that instils us with desire reveals some of our suppressed dreams and disrupts our classic representations, leading us down paths we dared not take or did not even know existed.

Though photography is meant to be anchored in reality, the slippage that is revealed creates uneasiness and confusion. The mechanism that the artist imposes on us causes attraction and repulsion for their image. The tension between two subjects that by chance end up together leads to a feeling of insecurity.

Veiled eroticism, the uncanny, explosante-fixe, scopophilia, strange ordinariness… the lexical field that attempts to circumscribe surrealist photography is broad, just as the photographers who were influenced by that new creative space and who in turn contributed to it.

We present here a few of those photographers, a part of whose work belongs to the surrealist photography of the 1930s to 1950s: Denise Bellon, Pierre Boucher, Marc Foucault, Lucien Lorelle, Jean Painlevé, Pierre Molinier and Raoul Ubac in France and Philippe Halsman, Val Telberg, Ruth Bernhard in the United States.

 

Éric Rémy

Exhibition Curator



[1]             Quentin Bajac, Clément Chéroux, Guillaume Le Gall, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Michel Poivert, La Subversion des images (Paris: Paris édition centre Pompidou, 2009).

[2]             Manifesto of Surrealism (original published in 1924), the members who ‘have performed acts of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac’.

[3]             ‘In those days, a man at least as boring as I, Pierre Reverdy, was writing: The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be — the greater its emotional power and poetic reality... – Nord-Sud, March 1918’, Manifesto of Surrealism.

[4]             Christian Bouqueret, La photographie surréaliste (Paris: Actes sud, 2008).

[5]            La Subversion des images, op. cit.

Related artists

  • Pierre Boucher

    Pierre Boucher

  • Val Telberg

    Val Telberg

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