Mystery de facto: Magritte’s surrealist objects

Delve into the history of artist René Magritte and discover his philosophy, influences and relationships in lecture produced in association with the exhibition Magritte at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

From Magritte’s beginnings in Brussels and his first surrealist paintings to his iconic images of apples, hats and pipes, gain an in-depth understanding of Magritte as a painter. The role of the painter, as he saw it, was to create pictures of ideas – best portrayed by images of things we have already seen but whose secrets we have never imagined.

Magritte’s poetic technique has often been explained as a simple process of visual juxtaposition or as a kind of linguistic evasiveness, however neither explanation accurately accounts for the complexity of his work. In this lecture, Simon Weir will explore Magritte’s own ideas about surrealist objects and why other surrealists, especially Salvador Dalí, would reproduce Magritte’s motifs again and again.