One hundred years ago, André Breton published his Manifeste du Surréalisme, giving birth to a movement that would change the history of the 20th century and influence all the arts. Today, Surrealism celebrates its centennial and retains its dreamlike appeal, inspired by themes of love, dreams and madness, freedom from convention and rationality.
In celebration, a series of exhibitions around the world are honoring its greatest masters and most admirable expressions. The main exhibition, which can be visited until January 13, 2025, is hosted by the Centre Pompidou in Paris: curated by Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré, it brings together paintings, photographs, drawings, films, poems, and more, signed by the movement’s greatest exponents, such as René Magritte, Giorgio De Chirico, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and many others.
Even design has not remained indifferent to this artistic current, with experiments that directly recall art or reinterpret its canons and themes with great creativity. That is why we have collected the most “surreal” proposals from the world of furniture and decoration.
Raffaello Galiotto reinterprets classicism and its archetypes in Margraf’s Frammenti collection, marble works that are deconstructed, elastic, loose and reconnected, evoking the passage of a historicity that does not destroy itself but finds new connections.
Instead, reality also seems to lose its three-dimensionality in the Sculpt cabinet, a limited edition designed by Maarten Baas for Galleria Rossana Orlandi, lively and undulating in its metallic materiality.
Totemic character for Traccia, half table, half bird, designed in ’39 by Meret Oppenheim and now reissued by Cassina. In fact, it was originally called the Bird Leg Table, precisely because its base was made of a bird’s legs in cast bronze.
Ingo Maurer also crossed the line between the real and the imaginary with the Lucellino lamp; a winged light bulb floats above the table, both a real and a visual memory.
The surreal enters the everyday with Man Ray’s Le Témoin: “The great eye, the witness, observes you persistently in the house, when your conscience cannot resist; then you turn it upside down and it immediately becomes a sofa,” declared its author; part of the Ultramobile collection conceived by Dino Gavina in 1971 and now reissued by Paradisoterrestre, it is designed to be both functional and poetic.
The same eye, inspired by the works of Dalí and Magritte, appears in the ceramic creations of the artist and painter Lithian Ricci, including the jug from the Eyes collection (on Artemest): a brick-red background is studded with the motif of eyes, which characterize the inside and outside, in turn obtained with the delineo technique and a special ink.
The theme of the gaze and the subconscious, so dear to the Surrealists, is again embraced by Fornasetti in the plate no. 116 of the Tema e Variazioni series, in which the artist playfully reinterprets opera singer Lina Cavalieri’s features.
Elements of the everyday are transformed to become other than themselves. A hand becomes a ceramic vase (Impronta, designed by Ico and Luisa Parisi for Cassina), a skull becomes a soap dish (Brain Wash by Seletti), and a checkered sheet of paper becomes an entire collection of furniture (the Quaderna series by Superstudio for Zanotta).
A brand that has introduced the imaginary into decoration, transforming everyday objects into irreverent, irreverent, nonconformist pieces, is Gufram: its attitude towards the dreamlike is evident in furnishings such as Capitello, a seat (designed by Studio 65) that comes from the deconstruction of a Greek column, or Broken Mirror (by Snarkitecture), which takes the form of a hypnotic work of art, like a portal that opens in the wall.
Another portal to fantasy and the unknown is the Desiderio wallcovering, designed by Eva Germani for Wall&decò, which leaves room for desires and an infinite imagination behind curtains that play with light and shadow.
