Notes related to Surrealism

With major exhibitions such as the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022), Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum in the same period, Surrealism at the Centre Pompidou (which closed in 2025), and various revivals of lesser-known figures and centenary celebrations of the movement, surrealism has gained renewed momentum and has (somewhat) emerged from technical archives and private collections around the world.

The Botin Center, in Santander, is hosting the exhibition Maruja Mallo: mascara y compás (Maruja Mallo: Mask and Compass), a show that vindicates, through a broad selection of works from her most relevant periods, the figure of Maruja Mallo (Vivero, Spain, 1902 – Madrid, Spain, 1995). This exhibition delves into the legacy of the artist, a body of work which, like her own persona, has recently been the subject of revisions and visibility efforts to better integrate her trajectory into art historiography.

Amid the centenary of Surrealism, or at least from what is officially understood as its inception with the publication of The First Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton in 1924, it is truly significant to access an exhibition as profound as 1924: Other Surrealisms, presented by the MAPFRE Foundation in Madrid, which will later tour other locations. This exhibition is important for the centrifugal perspectives it presents, emphasizing the expansion of the main official—or officialism—ideas beyond Breton's boundaries and granting maximum importance to Latin America in the acceptance, production, and collaboration within the movement.

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University announces Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver, the new exhibition opening on January 22, 2025. The exhibition, curated by Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator, will feature over 30 of Carrington’s spellbinding artworks, loaned from private collections, which have rarely been on public display.