Marvelous Objects: Surrealist Sculpture from Paris to New York

October 29 to February 15, 2016 (Second Level)

http://hirshhorn.si.edu/

The first major museum exhibition devoted to a comprehensive view of surrealist sculpture brings together more than 100 works created by more than 20 artists from France, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s.

“This exhibition reveals the totality of surrealist sculpture by highlighting two main approaches,” says Valerie Fletcher, senior curator and the project’s organizer. “Organic abstraction originated in the whimsical reliefs of Jean Arp and inspired many artists, including Henry Moore in Britain, Joan Miró in Spain, and Isamu Noguchi in the United States. Found-object assemblages, which originated in Marcel Duchamp’s Assisted Readymades, became a surrealist passion. Marvelous Objects also unifies into a single narrative the international development of surrealism in Europe and the United States.”

Among the 85 sculptures in the exhibition are Arp’s Shirt Front and Fork, 1922; Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?, 1921; Alberto Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932, and The Invisible Object (Hands Holding the Void), 1935; Man Ray’s Object to be Destroyed, 1933; Salvador Dalí’s Venus de Milo with Drawers, 1936; Moore’s Stringed Figure No. 1, 1937; Miró’s Lunar Bird, 1945; and David Smith’s Saw Head, 1933 and Chain Head, 1933.