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December 4, 2024 - February 20, 2025
André Masson. La mémorie du monde | Das Gedächtnis der Welt
DIE GALERIE, Frankfurt am Main

With the exhibition André Masson. La mémoire du monde | Das Gedächtnis der Welt DIE GALERIE ist now presenting its sixth solo show of the artist. In around 70 works on canvas and paper, along with a selection of sculptures, we take a closer look at the oeuvre of this unique and ‘unconventional’ surrealist.

The work of André Masson (1896-1987) is characterised by a remarkable diversity of techniques and subjects. As a major representative of surrealism and the creator of the so-called déssin automatique, his art synthesises the knowledge of centuries. In his paintings, drawings and sculptures, he captured inspirations from Goethe, Kleist and German intellectual history, including romanticism, impressionism and Asian calligraphy, and integrated them into a new and highly personal art and philosophy. ‘The artist must constantly reshape the universe or, if you will, create his own’, that was his credo. This conviction is reflected in an intense imagery, pervaded by a constant transformation, an eternal cycle of creation and decay.

 

 

Take the 3D Tour
 
 

December 4, 2024 - February 20, 2025
André Masson. La mémorie du monde | Das Gedächtnis der Welt
DIE GALERIE, Frankfurt am Main
December 4, 2024 - January 5, 2025
Surrealismus. Welten im Dialog.
Kunsthalle Vogelmann
November 1, - December 28, 2024
Beate Debus - Stillstand und Bewegung
Kunst Freunde Pritzwalk
September 4, 2024 - January 13, 2025
Surrealism
Centre Pompidou, Paris
September 26, 2024 - March 16, 2025
Alechinsky - Pinceau voyageur
Boghossian Foundation - Villa Empain

Highlight of the month


Roberto Matta

Oil on canvas
61 x 77 cm

Roberto Matta, born in 1911 in Chile, is one of the most important and idiosyncratic artists of the 20th century. After completing his architectural studies in his homeland, Matta came to Paris in 1933, where he worked in the studio of Le Corbusier and quickly established contacts within the Surrealist circle. In 1938, he participated in the International Exhibition of Surrealism and, like many of his fellow painters, went into exile in New York in 1939.


Like André Masson and Max Ernst, he exerted significant influence on the evolving American Abstract Expressionism. In his paintings of the 1940s, Matta created interior landscapes – "inscapes" – featuring apocalyptic and cosmological panoramas of crystalline transparency. The work method that he developed at the time involved merging the Surrealist automatic structures and the color progressions of the background with a thus inspired and resultant apparitional, non-concrete scenery.


After World War Two ended and he returned from exile, settling first in Rome and then Tarquinia, Matta's pictorial panoramas increasingly featured anthropomorphic machine organisms populating a technoid environmental sphere. Matta's artistic exploration of the rapid advances in science and his open political and philosophical positions led to increasingly complex, large-format, and epically expansive compositions. Matta died in 2002 in Italy.