Hybrids: The New Surrealists
October 29 through January 7, 2007
(Editor s Note: Many months ago we asked DeWitt Cheng if he would be
interested in curating a Museum exhibition that would explore current
trends in surrealism in the San Francisco Bay Area. He accepted, got
to work, and provided the comments below for this Newsletter. The
exhibition, Hybrids , will open Oct. 29.)
Curating this show on contemporary Bay Area surrealism was an offer I
couldn t refuse. A whole segment of human creativity was, I felt, not being addressed by an art world still in thrall to formalist thinking
with style valued inordinately over content, and flash over depth of feeling.I came to art in the late 60s through surrealism and other
imaginative art. For me, the dream imagery of Bosch, Goya, Ernst, Cornell, Magritte and others commented on the human condition in a way that
the abstract modes of expression pursued by mainstream artists,
ostensibly freed from history, did not.
Collage and juxtaposition are the heart of the visionary s ars
combinatoria . Imaginative artists do not reject figuration, narration, and literary meanings, as formalist dogma prescribed,
and art history to this way of thinking is as rich a repository of ideas, motifs and styles as the world is. These artists juxtapose and transform elements from life to make personal statements responding to the outer world with fantasy, humor, whimsy, parody or outrage. They assemble fragments of reality in order to subvert it. They make artistic sense of reality s chaos and nonsense.
Hybrids presents a number of Bay Area artists who use the combination and interpenetration of opposites to create rich personal worlds. DeWitt Cheng, 2006
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