UPTOWN—The show blends historic Surrealist masters—Carrington, Fini, Tanguy, De Chirico—with seventeen contemporary artists. But it doesn’t attempt the impossible comparison. As Kuspit points out, the psychic terrain of post-WWI Europe is not today’s. The original Surrealism emerged from wartime disillusionment; today’s echoes out of an aesthetic burnout—what Walter Robinson termed “zombie formalism”—and a pop culture flattened by its own irony. Zeller argues that Surrealism, alongside its precursor Dada, persists as...
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UPTOWN—The show blends historic Surrealist masters—Carrington, Fini, Tanguy, De Chirico—with seventeen contemporary artists. But it doesn’t attempt the impossible comparison. As Kuspit points out, the psychic terrain of post-WWI Europe is not today’s. The original Surrealism emerged from wartime disillusionment; today’s echoes out of an aesthetic burnout—what Walter Robinson termed “zombie formalism”—and a pop culture flattened by its own irony.
Zeller argues that Surrealism, alongside its precursor Dada, persists as the dominant visual grammar of our era, even if its original movement has dissolved. Breton’s notion of “pure psychic automatism” lingers not in manifestoes but in pigment and void. At its core, the exhibition stages a confrontation not between the old and new Surrealism, but between expression and banality, symbol and system, form and feeling.
The distinction is tonal, even atmospheric. Where Breton’s generation drifted in daydreams and Freudian ecstasies, the new Surrealism often feels darker, more night-terror than lucid dream. Robert Ryan’s “Night Watch” and “The Long Conversation” are not mystical; they are Romantic in the old sense—suffused with isolation, abandonment, and sublimated grief.
Installation at Robilant + Voena, NYC, with works by Jamie Adams and Laura Krifka, 2022–2024.Matt Hansel, A Dance With The Past, 2025, oil on linen, 56 × 70 in.
In Matt Hansel’s A Dance With The Past, a boy lifts a dragon in victory, while simultaneously vanishing through a hanging carpet into a devil-tinged paradise. A woman with a closed gaze regards a black snake. Each figure repeats its motif like a fractured tarot deck—St. George meets Dali’s masquerade. The art is studded with classical allegory (dice, masks, serpents), but soaked in postmodern ambiguity.
17 contemporary artists are included, seven women and ten men. Works span from 2018 to 2025, with media ranging from oil on linen and acrylic on panel to sculptural assemblage incorporating wood, metal, and found objects. The exhibition was curated by Robert Zeller and presented at Robilant + Voena, New York, in June 2025. Historical works by Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, and Yves Tanguy were shown alongside contemporary pieces by Matt Hansel, Arghavan Khosravi, Jamie Adams, Laura Krifka, Nicola Verlato, Noorain Inam, Alicia Adamerovich, and others.
The exhibition “The New Surrealism” is on view at Robilant + Voena, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, from June 6 through July 26, 2025.
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