Strange Gaze: Surrealism at Cross Lane Projects

Strange Gaze: Surrealism at Cross Lane Projects continues the world-wide celebrations marking 100 years of surrealism.The word ‘surrealist’ (suggesting ‘beyond reality’) was coined by the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire in the preface to a play performed in 1917. Surrealism aimed to revolutionise human experience: balancing a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s artists, including Jean Arp, Max Ernst, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, found magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional.

Today’s neo-surrealism neither smoothly continues surrealism’s original projects, nor makes a clean break with them. Instead, it adapts the pioneers’ discourse to what each artist finds pertinent at the present juncture. The exhibition, curated by the artist Rebecca Scott, brings together 16 artists with dreamlike and figurative works that reference and react to the current political and ecological context. Artists include: Emily Allchurch, Hans Bellmer, Dan Coombs, Emma Cousin, Mark Fairnington, Ian Frith Powell, Martin Greenland, Dereck Harris, Denise Hawrysio, Mike Healey, James Mackie, Bex Massey, Pascal Rousson, Rebecca Scott, Perdita Sinclair and Suzy Willey.

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