Surrealist master heads to Australia for a summer of blockbusters

He was the world-famous artist partial to a bowler hat.

Groundbreaking surrealist painter Rene Magritte created some of the most iconic paintings of the 20th century including Golconda, featuring men dressed in the retro fashion item floating a la Mary Poppins.

Rene Magritte’s Golconda (Golconde), 1953, from The Menil Collection, Houston. Credit: Paul Hester

Now the first retrospective of the Belgian artist ever held in Australia is coming to the Art Gallery of NSW in October.

Magritte is one of three summer blockbusters announced as part of the Sydney International Art Series that will bring the works of three internationally renowned artists exclusively to Sydney.

Funding for the next instalment of the series, which has run for more than a decade, had been under question until this week.

Its confirmation comes as a Treasury audit has pointed to the Art Gallery’s lack of ticketed shows and shortfalls in forecasted commercial revenues since the fanfare opening of its new $344 million building 18 months ago.

Cao Fei’s video work Nova (2019). Credit: Spruth Magers

Alongside Magritte, the art gallery will showcase Cao Fei, described as one of the most innovative young Chinese artists to have emerged on the international art scene in the past decade.

Across town, the Museum of Contemporary Art will present the first Australian solo exhibition of Ethiopian American visual abstractionist Julie Mehretu from November 30.

MCA director Suzanne Cotter said Mehretu was one of the art world’s most exciting living painters. “The experience of Mehretu’s paintings is nothing short of a visual and physical event,” she said.

Magritte was a leading figure of surrealism, the 20th-century art movement that explored ideas and the unconscious mind, radically influenced that century’s visual language and celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.

The exhibition will take visitors from the artist’s earliest works to his landmark contributions to surrealism and the renowned paintings of his final years before his death in 1967.

Magritte’s The False Mirror was once owned by surrealist photographer Man Ray.Credit: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Travelling to Australia will be Magritte’s The False Mirror (1929), which was once owned by photographer Man Ray and is now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

In addition to more than 80 paintings, the exhibition includes rarely seen photography, film and archival materials that shine a light on lesser-known aspects of the artist’s practice to reveal his subversive humour.

The Art Gallery has developed the exhibition in association with the Magritte Foundation in Brussels and the Menil Collection, Houston, home to the most comprehensive Magritte collection outside Europe.

The vast majority of loaned works have never been seen in Australia.

Arts Minister John Graham said the three artists were among the most influential and recognisable of their generations.

The government was ambitious to ensure Sydney was a “global cultural hub where art and creativity is celebrated, a place where locals and visitors can experience the most exciting and cutting-edge cultural offerings, from around Sydney, NSW, Australia, and the world”.

Julie Mehretu is coming to the Museum of Contemporary Art.Credit: Josefina Santo

Art Gallery director Michael Brand said Fei had documented China’s rapid urbanisation, globalisation and digital revolution for more than two decades.

Mehretu, who will visit Australia for her first exhibition, said abstraction was “something that you cannot define, you cannot necessarily hold it”.

“There is an opaqueness to how you think about and how one experiences the painting. My interests are not in trying to dictate, or determine, or explain, or try to give any information to anyone in that way.”

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