The exhibition “Surrealism: the infinite madness of dreams” will open to the public on Saturday 23 March 2024 at 10.00 am, an exhibition of over 60 works by the main surrealist artists set up at the Castle of Desenzano del Garda (Bs). In the centenary of the "Manifesto of Surrealism", written by André Breton in 1924,the exhibition aims to present an aesthetic based on research linked to dreams, the unconscious, madness until arriving at the world of eroticism, the fantastic and the game. Until 2 June 2024 it will be possible to admire the works of those who have represented an expressive research that finds in the labyrinths of metamorphosis the propulsive engine of a non-perceivable and mysterious reality: from René Magritte to Salvador Dalì, from Joan Mirò to André Masson, from Sebastiàn Matta to Hans Bellmer, from Man Ray to Max Ernst and Leonor Fini, without forgetting the inspiring father of the movement Giorgio de Chirico. Works from private Italian collections already presented in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, among which those exhibited in the historic "Dalì" exhibition held in New York, Tokyo and Geneva from 1964 to 1970 stand out, will offer the visitor the opportunity to confronting an artistic season capable of introducing, into our culture, a vision of the world that has gone far beyond the historical limits of the movement. For Mayor Guido Mal winter "the years change, but not the quality of the cultural offer brought to the Castle for citizens and tourists who from March will be able to enjoy the ancestral masterpieces of Surrealism, a genre as fascinating as it is contemporary for its forms and contents. Desenzano aims to be the Capital of Garda also from a cultural point of view and these initiatives, of depth and great artistic quality, ensure that this objective remains current and constant. I thank the organizers and the Department of Culture for having brought on display this latest exhibition which, I am sure, will win the hearts of enthusiasts, families and simple visitors intrigued by "the infinite madness of dreams". “We are at the fourth exhibition in Castello in just under two years, organized with the precious collaboration of Matteo Vanzan” continues the Councilor for Culture Pietro Avanzi, “up to now each exhibition has been a mix of emotions that has brought so many to our territory people from all over Italy and the world. A public success that has been consistently repeated, even in the latest release regarding Pop Art on which we have focused heavily in 2023.Today, however, we are moving on to a completely new genre, an exhibition that proposes, with around sixty works, a journey through one of the greatest avant-garde artistic movements of the twentieth century, Surrealism, born in Paris in the mid-1920s. This world includes artists who have become legends such as Salvador Dalì, Renè Magritte, Leonor Fini and Man Ray: for this reason I wish everyone to be able to discover the varied surrealist world with us, to enjoy its quality, beauty and uniqueness. And as always, let yourself be enchanted by the beauty, art and our Castle. "
In an excursus of poems, letters, films and works of art, the exhibition aims to offer a general overview of a breaking movement considered the last of the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century: the appeal to the irrational and the unconscious in opposition to the myth of reason, of objective reality and of tradition, this was Surrealism. It has its most distant origins from the French symbolist culture, from Apollinaire (to whom we owe the term) and in general from the experiences of the last decadentism; It has its immediate antecedent in the "anti-art" of Dada and reaches its precise theoretical formulation in Breton's Manifesto of 1924.The surrealist is not an aesthete, he is an investigator and an experimenter who extends his research to every field in an attempt to get to the bottom of things. “Surrealism” states the curator of the exhibition Matteo Vanzan “proposed to destroy the boundary between art and life, to change the very conception of the world to promote a better existence without the ethical conventions resulting from a past tradition that culminated with the First World War world. Like the Dadaist movement, Surrealism wants to destroy the established order to oppose a Western culture that has reached the point of collapse, but with a difference: while Dada is structured on a strong nihilistic component that does not indicate solutions, the surrealists do not seek the revolution as an end in itself, but a reconstruction that is based on new foundations, first of all the thought of Sigmund Freud".