Rene Magritte
Rene Magritte
René François Ghislain Magrittewas a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images. Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art...
NationalityBelgian
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth21 November 1898
CityLessines, Belgium
CountryBelgium
To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.
People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.
The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!
The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb.
The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
Too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange.
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.
We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.