arts, farts and tarts: February 2007

Presidents Day Weekend I ended up in LA. I decided to go check out the Magritte exhibit at LACMA. The exhibit was phenomenal, the exhibit was designed by John Baldessari.

This was the entrance into the first room of the exhibit, neat concept, gets your head into the dream like place surrealism takes you to.

This is a shot of what the galleries looked like, the floor was covered in cloud carpeting,and the ceiling had projected satellite images of the LA Freeways. If you look closely you can see that the ccolumn in the back of the room looks like a column out of a Magritte painting.

The exhibit had a pretty impressive collection of Magritte paintings, two of my all time favorites are shown below: the first Time Transfixed, 1938. The second The Rape, 1934

One of the great things about this exhibit was the way they showed Magritte paintings next to paintings of more contemporary artists who have been influenced by him. Below i have a couple of these pairings:

Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe), 1929

John Baldessari, Wrong, 1967

Magritte, Personal Values, 1952

Vlja Celmins, Untitled (Comb), 1970

Another highlight for me was the amount of work that they were showing from Magritte's "Vache" period.

Magritte, The Stop, 1948

This exhibit is only going to be around until March 4th, so if you do not have any plans this weekend go check it out! It really is an amazing exhibit and should be viewed by all Magritte lovers. Below are just a few more paintings that I love.