In Past Show

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926 - 1938 at Art Institute of Chicago

With his highly cerebral Surrealist imagery, René Magritte breathed new life into seemingly conventional subject matter. He often painted everyday objects out of context, in juxtapositions forcing the viewer to reconsider things normally taken for granted. In his iconic trompe l’oeil work The Treachery of Images (1928-29), for example, Magritte painted a hyperrealistic pipe and wrote, just beneath it, “this is not a pipe”—a caution not to trust our eyes and reminder that the art object, no matter how convincing, is not the real thing. Magritte’s highly figurative style of Surrealism is often discussed along the work of Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico, and his persistent interrogation of objects has both influenced and paved the way for seminal artistic movements, from Conceptualism to Pop art.