The work of René Magritte needs little introduction. Since his death in 1967, he has become one of the defining painters of the 20th century, his work influencing generations of artists while also permeating the world of popular culture at almost every level. Referenced by everyone from The Beatles to The Simpsons, his visual vocabulary—bowler-hatted men, veiled faces, enormous apples, and levitating rocks—has left a profound mark on the worlds of advertising, graphic design, film, and photography.
No other artist fused the ordinary with the uncanny so seamlessly, or shifted so effortlessly between a sense of ambiguity, dread, and deadpan humor tinged with occasional vulgarity. His enigmatic paintings, such as The Treachery of Images (1929) or The Human Condition (1933), transform everyday objects, places, and figures into surreal, psychologically charged puzzles. Combining an almost hyperrealist style with jarring shifts of scale, trompe l’oeil illusions, and visual fragmentation, his works raise fundamental questions about the boundaries between reality and representation.
Now, a major new exhibition at Gagosian in London seeks to trace his enduring legacy on the art world. “This is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte” (through December 12) brings together dozens of the artist’s key paintings and works on paper, setting them in dialogue with work by almost 50 contemporary artists.
As Jasper Sharp, the show’s co-curator, explained to Artsy, Magritte’s influence is by no means a recent phenomenon. “You have artists who were already making work in the ’50s thinking about Magritte, so his influence was already taking shape while he was still alive.” But the idea for the current show evolved when it became clear how great a shadow his work still casts in the 21st century. “Over the past few years, I've found myself having so many conversations about Magritte, unprompted by myself, with painters, filmmakers, and photographers.”
For Sharp, the explanation for this is twofold. “I think the reason that his works have such an enduring appeal is that they disclose themselves very quickly. But, like all really interesting art, they also work on a different level. They’re not completely understandable.” At the same time, his work is technically masterful, another source of inspiration for artists. As Sharp pointed ut, “Max Ernst famously described Magritte as a collagist in paint. Which is why he’s been so influential in the graphic design industry, the music industry, and the fashion industry. The way his works are constructed with different surfaces, different depths, gives so much potential to people who want to take his ideas and run with them.”
With this in mind, here are eight contemporary artists who share some affinity with Magritte’s themes and approach. The first four are featured in the Gagosian show, while the others are our own recommendations.
Lenz Geerk
B. 1988, Basel. Lives and works in Düsseldorf.
Tie III, 2024
Lenz Geerk
Roberts Projects
Man holding the night sky, 2024
Lenz Geerk
Roberts Projects
With their muted palettes and enigmatic subject matter, the paintings of Lenz Geerk exude a strong sense of Magrittean disquiet. Like the Belgian master, his work is steeped in art history, and the figures, objects, and places he depicts seem deeply rooted in the world of dreams. In Tie III (2024), a man in a suit stands stiffly against a bare wall, gazing at his tie unfurled on the floor at his feet, while in Man Holding the Night Sky (2024), a figure stands atop a rock, unfurling a black sheet emblazoned with stars. Cryptic and mysterious, Geerk’s work carefully balances what to reveal and what to withhold.
Dominique Fung
B. 1987, Ottawa, Canada. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Look Steadily and Intently, 2021
Dominique Fung
Woaw
Born in Canada, but with ancestry in Shanghai and Hong Kong, Dominique Fung’s work is inspired by Asian artefacts encountered in museums during her youth. Reimagined through a contemporary lens, she liberates these objects from their colonial or imperialist histories, imbuing them with a new and complex life of their own.
Blending older traditions of European painting—whether Baroque, Rococo, or Renaissance—with a Surrealist streak recalling Magritte and Dorothea Tanning, works such as Stray Hair (2020) and Look Steadily and Intently (2021) have a dreamlike quality that hints at unsettling narratives just beyond our grasp. And, much like Magritte, her works operate on multiple levels. Combining elements of humor and the uncanny, their sensuous and exquisitely painted surfaces conceal more serious undertones lurking beneath.
Joseph Yaeger
B. 1986, Helena, Montana. Lives and works in London.
Joseph Yaeger’s paintings, like Magritte’s, are full of secrets. Opaque, voyeuristic, and enigmatically titled, they are charged with a noirish atmosphere of mystery and uncertainty, occupying an uneasy space somewhere between dreams and cinema stills (on which many of them are based). The faces of his figures are often veiled or obscured—by smoke, shadows, bandages, or another person’s hand—resisting any straightforward emotional or psychological interpretation. In particular, they recall iconic works by Magritte, such as The Lovers (1928) or The Son of Man (1946).
Working in watercolor on gesso, his works combine technical mastery with subtle hints of decay, their scarred and cracked surfaces dusted with studio debris, evoking a pervasive sense of dread or unease that underpins so many aspects of modern existence. New works by Yaeger will go on view at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo later this fall.
Isabelle Albuquerque
B. 1981, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Call Me, 2024
Isabelle Albuquerque
Newchild Gallery
Just as Magritte would sometimes depict the human form in fragmented, transfigured, or impossible states (as in Le Viol (1934/1945), in which a naked female torso merges with a woman’s face), Isabelle Albuquerque deconstructs the physical form to create formally complex sculptures with strong echoes of the surreal. Exploring women’s experience of desire, sexuality, and violence, she combines traditional techniques with contemporary technologies like 3D scans and lifecasts of her own body to create headless, truncated, or otherwise transmuted figures.
Often merging biological forms with manufactured, mundane, or mythological elements, her sculptures serve as prime examples of the ‘surreal object’, inviting any number of readings and interpretations. In the Gagosian show, her work Summertime Sadness (2024), in which a shock of fire-red human hair sprouts from a bronze cast of a dismembered arm, has definite affinities with Magritte. As Sharp pointed out, it was “the first object she suggested when we approached her for the exhibition.”
Kate Meissner
B. 1995, Sacramento. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Kate Meissner’s highly saturated, theatrically lit oil paintings present a mysterious shadow world in which familiar scenes are made alluringly strange. The female figures she depicts are elusive, possessed of an eerie, plastic quality somewhere between human and mannequin. Their faces are always obscured, their bodies contorted and partially veiled by fabric, and their limbs either prosthetic or missing altogether.
Often framed in tightly enclosed spaces such as doorways, nightclub booths, or peep-show stages, their compressed, claustrophobic settings evoke a palpable sense of unease while also hinting at unconscious or hidden desires. Blending the surrealism of Magritte with the body horror of filmmaker David Cronenberg, Meissner’s work fearlessly explores the complex emotional and psychological consequences for women of being on display, creating a potent cocktail of apprehension, dread, and curiosity.
Natalia Gonzalez Martin
B. 1995, Madrid. Lives and works in London.
Cascara II , 2024
Natalia Gonzalez Martin
Richard Saltoun
Painted on wood panels using egg tempera and rabbit skin glue, the exquisitely detailed paintings of Natalia Gonzalez Martin hark back to medieval icons, Renaissance altarpieces, and illuminated manuscripts. However, the atmosphere she creates within these confined spaces remains compellingly odd, infused with a healthy dose of Magrittean Surrealism, ambiguity, and eroticism.
Filtered through the lens of her Catholic upbringing, Gonzalez Martin renders everyday objects strange, poetic, or mystical. She often isolates body parts or objects, placing them in flat, shadowless voids, disrupting the viewer’s sense of reality. And, while her paintings sometimes hint at religious ritual and symbolism, their meaning is much more opaque, evoking both past and present, divine and secular, suggesting that there are other ways to exist within the world.
Zhou Song
B. 1982, Jiangxi, China. Lives and works in Beijing.
Wisdom Tree I, 2025
Zhou Song
Maddox Gallery
Holy Light, 2024
Zhou Song
Volery Gallery
A mind-bending mixture of hyperrealism and surreal flights of fancy, Zhou Song’s remarkable oil paintings explore both the anxieties and the sense of possibility engendered by an age of constant technological acceleration. In his work, natural and artificial elements are distorted and reconfigured in uncanny new forms as the world we know unravels before our eyes. In Wisdom Tree I (2025), for instance, pencils coil through trees like branches, while in other works, candles twist together like snakes, and a rabbit balances a tower of hats on its back.
His “New Nature” series (2020–26) is like Magritte reimagined for the post-human age, and borrows freely from the Belgian artist’s iconic repertoire of motifs. Men in suits, apples, bowler hats, and blue skies full of clouds all feature prominently. Indeed, Homeland (2020) is a direct homage to Magritte’s famous painting The Great War (1964).
Kristin Sanders
B. 1989, California. Lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Shell/Tool, 2023
Kristen Sanders
Asya Geisberg Gallery
Hand and Flint, 2023
Kristen Sanders
Moosey
Magritte’s work often explored the gulf between the physical body and the consciousness within it, and the vividly colored paintings of Kristin Sanders operate in a similar psychological space, reframing it for an era in which artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a reality. The world she conjures is one of mystery and uncertainty—a kind of fever dream in which past and future, human and mechanical, have merged, and the viewer is never sure exactly what they are seeing.
A sense of Magrittean surrealism pervades her work. In Stone/Shift (2023), the face of a humanoid robot is obscured by a piece of sheer silk, while in Body Thing (2023) a hand holds a fragment of a human face, its single eye staring helplessly out at the viewer. And A Sense of Reality (2023), in which a piece of flint hovers in mid air against a cloudy sky, makes a direct reference to Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959).
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/CLBuADY
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