Surrealism Movement : Altering Reality in Art Works

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Because altering reality can be created in so many different forms, artists from the turn of the 20th century have been altering reality in magnificent art works. Artists are able to physically alter our reality and how we perceive reality through their manipulation of visual language; telling the untold, speaking the unspeakable and transferring the viewer to a mythical imaginable universe where anything can happen. They created a way to escape the real world, a place where the audience can relax, and feel peaceful.
Two remarkable and well-known artists that alter reality are Salvador Dali and Alex Andreev. Dali’s well known surrealism art works appeared in the late 1920’s and are iconic for this period. Dora Ades said of Dali’s artworks “Surrealism advocate[s] the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination.” (Ades, D. 2001 pg. 35) Andreev’s art works are a contemporary twist on surrealism and are contrastingly bright and energetic. Both are successful in altering reality as they manipulate the audience’s reality physically and mentally as they use out of place objects, physically impossible themes and intriguing ideas.
After WW I the people craved for something to ease their minds from the sorrow and suffering and reality of war. The surrealism movement intended to create art; literature and philosophy that was soothing to the soul and helped them forget or alter the reality they were living in. There was also developments in the study of the human mind by Sigmund Freud that opened up ideas about imagination, which inspired many artists such as Dali.
Salvador Dali’s works alter reality through illusion. This tech...

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...ipulate the audience’s thoughts and engages them in the artists altered reality Dali said “[Man] has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdad’s of his dreams to rise from the dust and destroys the shackles limiting our vision.”(Dali, S. 1940)

Works Cited

Ades, D, 2001. Surrealism, The Oxford Companion to Western Art. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Dali, S. 2014. Salvador Dali Quotes - BrainyQuote . [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/salvador_dali.html. [Accessed 23 March 2014].
Abduzeedo Design Inspiration. 2014. More of Alex Andreyev's Surreal Illustrations. [ONLINE] Available at: http://abduzeedo.com/more-alex-andreyevs-surreal-illustrations. [Accessed 23 March 2014].
Andreev, A. 2014. A Separate Reality. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.alexandreev.com/. [Accessed 23 March 2014].

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