Surreal Spaces

Surreal Spaces explores fantastical interiors and exteriors dreamed up by some of today's most imaginative printmakers. Featuring works by artists including David Avery, Erik Desmazières, Annemarie Petri, and Gerard Trignac, among others, the exhibition presents images both dreamlike and nightmarish – bizarre visions drawing the eye and mind into intricately beautiful new worlds. 

Surreal Spaces celebrates 'Art Fantastique,' a broad genre not restricted to any specific time, location, or school, but rather characterized by non-realistic subject matter portrayed in a representational and naturalistic style. Though loosely defined, it has been an integral part of many other art movements including Mannerism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Magic Realism, and, of course, Surrealism. 

The works in Surreal Spaces depict futuristic cities, ancient ruins, peaceful gardens, and cluttered interiors with complex detailing and baroque flourishes that impart a sensibility, and even familiarity, into images of places and times that have never existed in our world but are rooted in our knowledge and understanding of it. Taking cues from history, mythology, science fiction, and fantasy, the works represent artistic worldbuilding at its best; each piece is a cosmos unto itself, a lived in reality of some other people or civilization. Highlights include Annemarie Petri's monoprint etchings of starkly ethereal cities that seem to exist between dimensions, fading in and out perception; Gerard Trignac's L'Embarquement pour Cythère, a dark and haunting play on Jean-Antoine Watteau's famous Rococo 'fête galante;' David Avery's The Anatomy of Melancholy, in which macabre marginalia explode across a windswept room; and Erik Desmazières' cerebral Passage du Caire, a twisted, serpentine reimagining of Paris' oldest covered arcade. 

Surreal Spaces is on view in Childs Gallery's upstairs print department August 9 through September 29, 2024.