Victor Brauner, The Magical Adventure

Victor Brauner's work, original, erudite, full of inventions and humour, drew nourishment from his Romanian origins and the Bucharest avant-gardes of the 1920s, his encounter with André Breton and surrealism from 1933 onwards, as well as archaic civilisations and the most varied mythologies.

His fascination with esotericism and the most secret dogmas, German Romantics, and non-Western arts constitutes a marvellous visual laboratory of metamorphoses. This creation, fascinating and enigmatic, bears witness to a world in the making, moving from autobiography to mystery, tending towards universality.

His polymorphic work (painting, drawing, sculpture, object, etc.) accounts for a considerable construction of multiple objects to conjure his inner world and that which surrounds him. Attempting to abstract himself from contingent reality, Victor Brauner creates legendary universes where the fantastic neighbours the marvellous, sometimes caught by irony to escape an surrounding barbarity or sublimated by magic to elaborate a personal cosmogony. Despite the Great History that weighed heavily on Victor Brauner, like other foreign artists of the early twentieth century, the painter pursued his inventions throughout his life with exemplary tenacity and generous originality.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Hatje Cantz.