"THIS IS NOT A DREAM" - Digital exhibition of two great Surrealists Rene Magritte and Frida Kahlo.
From January 12, 2023, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA) will open the digital exhibition "THIS IS NOT A DREAM" - the first time in Vietnam to introduce nearly 100 classic works in digital versions of two great Surrealists Rene Magritte and Frida Kahlo.
Rene Magritte (Belgium, 1898-1967) and Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954) can be seen as the two extremes of Surrealism and the negative. If Frida - who always paints his own reality, Rene paints everyone's reality - with a twist somewhere. Magritte's works, from murals, magazine covers, to classics, are all aimed at an audience. To interact with the audience, Magritte is interested in creating puzzles, unknowns, and visual tricks. He wanted to paint the impossible as a form of realistic expression, thus free from coincidences and coincidences, which was the opposite of contemporary Surrealist painters.
Conversely, Frida Kahlo's work was introspective. She made her work for herself, true to her own vision, first and foremost about exploring her own identity. Like the painting "Two Fridas" painted in 1939, Kahlo uses painting to explore ‘the reality of her own body and her consciousness of that reality; in many cases the reality dissolves into a duality, exterior reality versus interior perception of that reality, or two selves, one loved, the other not.’ (Chadwick, W, 1991). An obvious difference that stands out in the respective works of these two artists is that Magritte is famous for doing almost anything to avoid revealing his face, he uses apples, birds, flowers, cloth to cover his face and often than male characters with faces facing back. In contrast, Kahlo looks in the mirror for a long time, confronts her pain and reveals it all to us, with more than a third of her paintings being self-portraits.
Magritte explained the apple covering his face in the self-portrait The Son of Man, 1964, as follows: ‘Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.’ The exhibition “THIS IS NOT A DREAM” is a journey following two Surrealist artists to find similarities as well as differences, to see realities hidden behind reality, realities that are not dreams.
The exhibition "THIS IS NOT A DREAM" is open to the public from January 12, 2023 to the end of March 12, 2023 at Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA), Vincom Mega Mall Royal City, Hanoi. During the exhibition period, VCCA will also organize an art tour revolving around the story of the creation and the meaning of the work's themes, giving the public a profound artistic experience.
*Chadwick, W. (1991) Women artists and the surrealist movement. Thames & Hudson
