A WaterFire Symposium, New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting with author and visual artist Robert Zeller
Join us with our partners at Symposium Books for the first WaterFire Symposium of 2024 in the gallery at the WaterFire Arts Center on Thursday, April 25 starting at 6:30 p.m. with critically acclaimed author and visual artist, Robert Zeller as he discusses his newest book, New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The book offers a sweeping exposition of both historical Surrealism and its legacy in the world of contemporary art. It demonstrates the many ways in which the most significant art movement of the last century continues to be relevant today, featuring an international selection of contemporary artists whose compositions and studio practice reveal its influence.
The book begins with a study of the origins, leadership, participating artists, and major milestones of historical Surrealism. Zeller uses a timeline-centric approach, starting the narrative just before the beginning of the movement at the end of World War I and the birth of Dada. The most important players and events emerge as they came up in the timeline of events, through World War II, including Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Leonora Carrington and many others, up until the death of its leader Andre Breton in 1966.
Zeller then explores how elements of New Surrealism are being put into practice throughout the contemporary art world. Section Two offers a survey of twenty-nine contemporary artists who engage in New Surrealism’s seemingly unlimited variations of the movement’s original themes, including Rosa Loy, Glenn Brown, and Arghavan Khosravi. Section Three features fourteen artists who speak to Surrealism’s influence on their studio practice and detail how they create a composition, in their own voice from start to finish, including contributions by Inka Essenhigh, Ginny Casey and Anna Weyant.
Many of the modalities of historical Surrealism that still maintain contemporary currency: presenting the familiar as unfamiliar and uncanny, the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated imagery and the use of absurdity to critique political or social issues, as well as the use of erotic imagery in an irrational, non-linear context. Not all the artists brought together in this book self-identify as Surrealist per se, but each uses some variation of it in a personal manner.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Zeller is a visual artist, writer and curator who received a BFA from a joint program of the Boston Museum School and Tufts University and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. He maintains a studio practice in Brooklyn, where he creates Surrealist-inspired work. He is the recipient of two Posey Fellowships and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has curated group exhibitions in New York City, and his art has been exhibited and collected in the United States, Europe and Mexico. He has written two books for Monacelli Press, an imprint of Phaidon International, The Figurative Artist’s Handbook (2017), and New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting (2023). He contributed a chapter to Photography: Real and Imagined (2023), profiling the permanent collection of Surrealist photography of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and has also written for The Brooklyn Rail and other influential art periodicals and blogs. In 2009, he founded The Teaching Studios of Art, an in-person and online art school devoted to instruction in figurative art.
In the promotion of New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting (2023) Zeller has recently given lectures, held artist-panel discussions and book-signings at Gagosian, Lyles & King, Rizzoli Bookstore and other prominent venues.
PRESS
In this wide-ranging NYTimes feature, reporter Nina Siegal discusses the Centennial of Surrealism (1924-2024), which is the theme of several new exhibitions in both Paris and Brussels, and also concurrent exhibitions in the US. It is a very comprehensive article with quotes from many important industry players. I was interviewed and quoted a few times in a (mostly) historical context regarding those topics and in relation to my book, New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting.
Robert Zeller invites a new generation of readers to explore the evolution of surrealism, offering insights into its contemporary manifestations and enduring relevance.
…in New Surrealism, Zeller has successfully brought some of the most prominent artists of vivid contemporary imaginative realism to the attention of an international audience, and what ties them to the surrealist past is that they all make “what might be” their subject, rather than “what is”, creating excellent, technical paintings of potential, and these are deeply satisfying to the new 21st-century audience of Millennials and Gen Z, a cohort hungry for honest metaphysics, feeling for their cultural foundations, and welcoming an open-minded tradition of inventive exploration.
Highly recommended! This is an important and beautiful book of spectacular work created by some of the best imaginative realists of our time. Fantastic!
ABOUT WATERFIRE SYMPOSIUM
WaterFire is pleased to partner with Symposium Books to host and co-curate this series of public dialogues that are presented for free and are open to all.
The WaterFire Symposium is a series of public lectures, readings and conversations about vital and timely issues from the arts to the sciences, from history to the climate crisis. WaterFire’s mission is to inspire our community. Bringing us all together in cordial discussion about the issues impacting our community helps us better understand the issues of the day.
**The views and opinions expressed by speakers/presenters at the WaterFire Arts Center are those of the speakers/authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of WaterFire Providence or any of our partners, sponsors, or supporters.**
