Spanning borders and decades, new surrealism exhibition at London’s Tate

From Salvador Dali’s “Lobster Telephone” to Ted Joans’ massive “Long Dance” drawing, a new exhibition at London’s Tate Modern explores the global span of surrealism over 60 years.
Opening on Thursday, Surrealism Beyond Borders features more than 150 artworks, ranging from paintings and sculpture to photography and film.

👁️ Surrealism Beyond Borders open at Tate Modern on Thursday 24 Feb! 🎨 And guess what! We’ll be keeping the show open after hours on Sunday 27 Feb exclusively for Tate Collective. 🕰️ Book your £5 ticket 🎟️ at: https://t.co/tBhBTAUjzn pic.twitter.com/lIENJDlAZi
— Tate Collective (@TateCollective) February 11, 2022
On show are Rene Magritte’s “Time Transfixed” painting of a train coming through a fireplace as well as Joans’ 36-foot (11 m) drawing “Long Dance”, which took nearly 30 years to complete and features arts from around the world.
Pablo Picasso‘s “The Three Dancers”, Malangatana Ngwenya’s untitled painting of people fighting for independence in Mozambique and “Deification of a Soldier” Japan’s Yamashita Kikuji are among the artworks showcasing the 20th century movement’s geographic reach.

“As you walk through these galleries you can see arts from Cairo, from Seoul, from Haiti, from Tokyo, from London, from Paris, from Prague and beyond,” Frances Morris, director ofTate Modern, told Reuters.
“What the show depicts is a kind of ecosystem of contact and tentacles linking arts (through) friendships and belief systems and their absolute commitment to freedom. Freedom ofexpression and freedom from constraint … It feels very now.”
Also on display are two pictures American model, war photographer and surreal Lee Miller, acquired the Tate Modern. The photos, “Portrait of Space” and “The Cloud Factory”, were taken in the late 1930s when Miller was living in Cairo with her Egyptian husband Aziz Eloui Bey.

So amazing to finally see Ted Joans’s work on the walls of the Met in the Surrealism Beyond Borders show 😍 His Long Dance Exquisite Corpse was compiled over 3 decades & includes the drawings of more than 100 of his many friends and fellow arts #surrealismbeyondborders pic.twitter.com/3AUiVgz6t3
— Joanna Pawlik (@JoPawlik) November 21, 2021
“It’s very emblematic of her wanting to escape and her sense of adventure and how you see things in different ways when you’re a surreal,” Ami Bouhassane, Miller’s granddaughter andco-director of the Lee Miller archives, said of “Portrait of Space”.
“I mean this is just the broken fly screen on the window, of the doorway in the rest house, in the middle of the western desert. But she … noticed it and set up the shot.”
“The Last Voyage of Captain Cook”, a sculpture Miller’s second husband Roland Penrose also features at the exhibition.
“Surrealism Beyond Borders” runs from Feb. 24 until Aug. 29.
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