Inka Essenhigh | Artsy

Surrealism grew out of the angst of the 1920s. Countries across the globe were still reeling from the devastation of World War I. The Western world was just coming around to radical new art forms such as Cubism and jazz. Advances in radios, medicine and psychology, commercial airlines, and automobiles were helping people rethink the mind and body, as well as the future of communication and transportation. Out of this chaotic blend of progress and loss, André Breton established a new philosophy. In his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, he outlined the movement’s contours and wrote about how dreams and reality would resolve into “a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.” Salvador Dalí would go on to paint melting clocks, while Frida Kahlo rendered herself as a wounded deer.

Breton noted that artists had been working in this vein for centuries: He named essayist Jonathan Swift, libertine philosopher the Marquis de Sade, and poet Arthur Rimbaud as past surrealists. These assertions suggested their dreamy mode wasn’t a fad, but an impulse common to many artists and writers across centuries. It has, in fact, persisted in various forms since the height of its popularity in the mid-20th century. In 2019, artists are still creating pictures, photographs, and films that revel in the uncanny. Below, we investigate a few of their practices.