The Surreal House at Barbican Art Gallery on artrepublic.com

Bringing together over 150 works, the exhibition also reveals the profound influence surrealism has had on a host of contemporary artists, filmmakers and architects. In an ambitious installation by acclaimed architects Carmody Groarke the exhibition is designed to be experienced as an extraordinary surreal house in its own right. 

For the Surrealists the house was more than ‘a machine for living’, as identified by Modernist heavyweight Le Corbusier. Instead it was a ‘stage for living’, a convulsive theatre of the domestic; a real space, inhabited, if not by people, then by their ghosts. In The Surreal House all the exhibits show the significance of the unconscious world of dreams and desires, presenting extraordinary dwellings that reflect everything that the rational, sanitized house sacred to Modernism is not.

Combining works of the imagination with important examples of actual ‘surreal’ houses, the exhibition presents a diverse range of paintings, photographs, films, models and installation from public and private collections in Britain, Europe, Canada and the United States, many rarely seen in the UK. The Surreal House brings together first generation Surrealists, precursors and close associates, with contemporary artists and architects. Iconic works by Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, and René Magritte are set alongside works by Giorgio de Chirico, Le Facteur Cheval and Edward Hopper as well as contemporary works by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Sarah Lucas. Filmmakers include Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, Andrei Tarkovsky and Jan Švankmajer, whilst modern and contemporary architecture is represented by John Hejduk, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi and Diller & Scofidio.

The exhibition opens with Buster Keaton and Marcel Duchamp. American filmmaker Keaton, much loved by the Surrealists, is famed for his absurd lyric humour and extraordinary stunts. 

Representing the inside of a house, the lower galleries take the visitor on a labyrinthine journey through a series of intimate chambers of varying scale that evoke different rooms including the bathroom, toilet, bedroom, salon, nursery and cellar. Linked by passages, these interiors are characterized by dark and light, sound and silence, compression and expansion. Down a dimly lit passageway someone singing opera can be heard from behind The Toilet in the Corner, 2008, an installation by Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Concert for Anarchy, 1990, byGerman artist Rebecca Horn, is a grand piano suspended upside down from the 6 metre-high Gallery ceiling. A mechanism within is timed so that every few minutes the instrument erupts into action, with the lid flying open and the keys jutting out in a cacophonous shudder.

Further themes explored downstairs include Femme Maison, epitomized by the work of LouiseBourgeois and The Haunted House, featuring Edward Hopper’s masterpiece House by a Railroad, 1925. Other highlights include the entire series of 19 black & white photographs, shown together for the first time, from La Subversion des Images ,1929-30, by Belgian photographer Paul Nougé’s; a powerful group of haunting images by Francesca Woodman; Sarah Lucas’ unforgettable piece Au Naturel ,1994; and a whole room installation, The Wait, 1964-65, by Ed Kienholz, never before seen in London.

On the upper level, circumnavigating the hidden chambers below, the visitor is metaphorically transported to the rooftops of The Surreal House, a space consisting of eight individual bays devoted to a dialogue between surrealist pieces, contemporary art and architecture. This part of the exhibition opens with Salvador Dalí’s iconic and rarely seen painting Sleep,1937, featuring a giant disembodied head, held precariously aloft on the ‘crutches of reality’. Behind the closed eyelids is the hidden domain – the home of dreams. If the crutches give way, then the head falls to the ground and the dreamer is awoken from their slumbers. Juxtaposed is a film of Villa dall’Ava, France, 1996, designed by Rem Koolhaas, who acknowledges a huge debt to surrealism, and OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture). This impressive dwelling with a rooftop swimming pool, teetering on giraffe-like legs, is in every sense a contemporary reflection of Dali’s delirious dream painting.

The exhibition is punctuated with powerful cinematic images of houses under attack or magically transformed as if in a dream. It concludes with the hauntingly beautiful sequence of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film,The Sacrifice, 1986, in which Alexander, the protagonist sets fire to his dacha, a Russian country house and symbol of all that he holds dear.

OPENING HOURS: Mon, Fri –Sun: 11.00 – 20.00, Tue & Wed: 11.00 – 18.00, Thur: 11.00 – 22.00

Image Credits:

Salvador Dalí, Sleep, c. 1937. Private collection, © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador, Dalí, DACS, London 2010

René Magritte, The Lovers, 1928, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of, Richard S. Zeisler, 1998. © Photo SCALA, Florence/The Museum of, Modern Art, New York, 2010 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2010

Sarah Lucas, Au naturel, 1994, Courtesy Murderme and Sadie Coles, HQ, London, © Sarah Lucas , Photo: Larry Lame, New York

The Surreal House, Claude Cahun, Self portrait (in cupboard), c. 1932, Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections