I saw Real/Surreal and they gave me a sticker.
The exhibit was curated and organized by The Whitney, and making it’s first stop on tour at the GRAM, where it will be from October 19 to January 13.
As you walk into the exhibit, you see the description of it on the wall, with coloured lights pointing to it, which looked kind of cool. When I walked into the first room of the exhibit, I looked around at the works a little bit. They had some pretty significant paintings, Hopper and Wyeth and such. All of the work is from the 1920’s to 1950’s, and it’s all American. That’s not an era and The piece that caught my eye in this room was Anatomical Painting, by Pavel Tchelitchew. It doesn’t quite fit wit the rest of the works, but it’s striking nonetheless.
In the next room, there’s a similar layout, but hidden in the back corner is an interactive part of the exhibit. It consists of a piece of glass standing in the middle of this smaller room they’ve made, and you’re supposed to create a piece of art relating to your dreams. I hope that I’m not the target audience for this, because it didn’t work for me at all.
One major thing I noticed about the exhibit is that it’s colored. The walls, instead of your range of art gallery colors (white, off white, grey, slightly blue) are dark purple and green and yellow, which makes it feel like you’re not quite in a museum. There are also walls in the middle of the room, short walls, at odd angles that kind of throw me off. I think I need walls to exist on a grid. It’s an impressive collection of pieces, but there’s something about it that didn’t quite work for me. It has the ingredients of something great, but the whole exhibit falls short of that.