The first group exhibition of surrealist art opened at Galerie Pierre in Paris in November 1925. Celebrating a century of visionary somnambulism, the Frist on Friday brings a landmark Tate collection survey to Nashville that traces the movement’s provocative, irreverent and disturbing meanderings throughout Europe and across the globe. International Surrealism From Tate: Fifty Years of Dreams gathers together paintings, photographs and sculptures as well as publications and archival materials. The show is organized according to the various moods and modes that make up surrealism’s wildly divergent production: dreams, automatism, desire, mysterious natural energies and radical libertarian politics. The established European figures are the highlights here: Dalí, Magritte, Ernst and Miró, but the exhibition’s surprise offerings include less celebrated international figures like Mexican photographer Kati Horna, Mozambican painter Malangatana Ngwenya, Japanese artist Osamu Shiihara and Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt. Surrealism was always a process-based approach more interested in perspective and state of mind than in establishing a particular, recognizable visual aesthetic. It’s a movement that’s periodically dismissed before it inevitably returns to haunt the culture anew.
Through Aug. 30 at the Frist
919 Broadway
