Magritte exhibition review: brilliance and 'trash' at Gagosian — SkimNews
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- Gagosian is staging "Magritte: This Is Still Not a Pipe," placing the Belgian surrealist's canvases alongside works by Jeff Koons, Sarah Lucas, and Isabelle Albuquerque in a show the reviewer calls part brilliance and part trash.
- Magritte's 1935 painting "The Interpretation of Dreams," lent by its owner Jasper Johns, mislabels three objects — a horse's head as "the door," a clock as "the wind," a jug as "the bird" — but accurately identifies a suitcase as "the valise," demolishing the idea that dreams can be decoded.
- The 1936 self-portrait "The Philosopher's Lamp" merges Magritte's nose with a pipe bowl in a reading the reviewer calls an obvious Freudian joke, satirising psychoanalysis and surrealism's over-logical decoding of symbols.
- The 1931 canvas "The Curse" depicts painterly, Gainsborough-esque clouds whose title sabotages their sunniness, showing Magritte capable of convincingly realistic scenes he then deliberately undermines.
- The reviewer pans the contemporary pairings — Koons's train and Aqualung, Lucas's nude, and Albuquerque's wooden statue — as "one-dimensional compared with Magritte's conundrums," accusing Gagosian of "commercial glibness" in its choices of supposed peers.
- Magritte's "Vache" (cow) period produced lurid, deliberately awful paintings — including a cartoonish daub of three strutting legs, signed by Magritte — made to annoy his family, friends, and fans.
Why it matters: The review exposes a curatorial tension at Gagosian: museum-grade Magrittes, including a Jasper Johns–owned masterpiece, paired with contemporary works the critic calls one-dimensional. It argues Magritte's true irreverence was reserved for his own "Vache" period "trash" paintings — works by Magritte himself that still outclass the 21st-century artists hung alongside him.
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