Images du Labyrinthe : l’atelier surréaliste

To mark the Surrealist Centenary (1924-2024), Christie's invites the artist Audrey Guttman to design a “carte blanche” exhibition celebrating the movement and placing it in resonance with her own work. The exhibition centers on the mythical site of the Surrealist atelier, where “images of the labyrinth” (Caillois) illuminate the map of an inexhaustible territory, one that is essential to the artist. Under her curation, the exhibition traces a singular and personal path through the Surrealist maze, with ten chapters evoking founding themes and visions of the Surrealist dream. Along the maze, visitors encountered lived-in installations such as "the surrealist atelier", an homage to the artist's studio as “refuge from all the machinations of the world” (Gracq), and to André Breton's famed staging of intimate, living cosmogonies. This is the surrealist furnace par excellence, where boundaries are resolutely porous between collecting and creating, thought and poetry, words and images. As reinvented by André Breton, the wall no longer confines us, but liberates. It is this absolute freedom that the artist wishes to show, through the principles of collage and assemblage that are at the very core of the surrealist logic. The exhibition features an interactive labyrinth installation that invites visitors to play along with chance. In this respect, it mirrors Surrealism itself, which appears to be driven by fantasy yet overlaps with a journey of initiation that leads us to think about existence in a different way. At the heart of all our contradictions, including the very contradiction of celebrating the astonishing nature of Surrealism, the labyrinth embodies the coexistence of freedom and constraint, of beginning and end, tracing the contours of a maze that, a hundred years later, we have still not finished exploring. From Oceanic sculptures to Lautréamont's poems, the exhibition highlights the movement's sources of inspiration, and pays tribute to figures ranging from André Breton to Valentine Hugo, Hans Bellmer to Leonora Carrington, Jane Graverol to René Magritte. Tracing a path through this forest of works, manuscripts, relics and objects, Guttman exhorts us to find our own way through the maze of possibilities, overcoming disorientation and frustration. In the gigantic magnetic field of inner life, getting lost is getting found.