Summary of Surrealist Sculpture
Surrealist sculpture rose from a desire to concretize what lies beneath. In the 1920s, the Surrealism movement began as artists and writers began to delve deeper underneath everyday, literal existence to mine the sandbox of the unconscious mind. It was a revolutionary impetus and philosophical drive first, its members craved to pierce the veil between reality and our more primitive desires, fantasies, taboos and the unconscious ephemera that nevertheless affects real life. They accomplished this by creating visual works across a massive spectrum of art, film, music, literature and philosophy. Surrealist sculpture evolved this process further by making manifest three dimensional objects conjured from those primal, subconscious spaces, bringing them to physical form where the underlying power and mystical presence of the imagination could no longer be denied.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- Surrealist sculpture perfectly enhanced Surrealism's radical provocations by forcing people to encounter physical objects that represented taboo or repressed issues floating just beneath our common surfaces. Rather than simply viewing a painting that might express one artist's buried madness or embarrassing fantasy, viewers were now invited to interact with the unreal made real, and touch a fantastical embodiment of repressed desire.
- Two major veins of work defined surrealist sculpture: the "biomorph" and the "objet trouvé" - giving two-sided insight into the way the imagination works when attempting to materialize the pure unconscious. In the former, we find abstracted shapes and forms created through organic, emotional association. In the latter, we find compositions of random items chosen intuitively without strategy or predetermination. Both represent the non-strategic, automatic processes of Surrealism.
- Surrealism had a major impact on modern art and continues to be seen globally across creative fields including film, literature, graphic design, fashion, and visionary art. This is a testament to the freedom unleashed by Surrealism's initial mission whereby artists and writers may convey their own uniquely individual thoughts, feelings and innermost drives through creative means. It loosened the field of possibilities and promised perpetual fodder to mine.
Overview of Surrealist Sculpture
Founder of Surrealism André Breton defined the movement as "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." Surrealist artists were heavily influenced by concepts found within psychoanalysis, particularly Sigmund Freud's theories that our repressed desires and fears oftentimes float to the surface through the subconscious temple of dreams or the unfettered creative flow of poetry and art. Surrealism claimed to be an invisible ray, which channeled the unconscious mind in order to unlock its imagination and to showcase its myriad taboos, complexities and similarities within man. This provided an arena where artists could forego conscious thought and embrace chance.
