How to turn a book into an exhibtion—"A Mysterious Vision" at Robilant+Voena
Curation for a book is one thing. Curation for an art gallery is quite another.
ABOVE: A mock-up of the cover of the catalog for the exhibition, featuring a gorgeous painting by the artist Alessandro Keegan, “Primal Force.”
In December 2023, New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting was published, a project that I had worked on for almost three years. The book has been distributed worldwide, and it is no exaggeration to say that is has received much acclaim. I will not list all of the accolades in this post, but you can read them here if you wish.
When I first sat down with Fred Bancroft, the Director of the New York location of Robilant +Voena, to discuss the possibility of doing an exhibition based on New Surrealism, there were two main issues at hand: one of budget and logistics—that book is international in scope, featuring artists from all over the world—and the other thematic. There were at least 7-8 major themes running through New Surrealism. How could an exhibition put them on display best, and which should be given primary status?
ABOVE: ”A Mysterious Vision” is an exhibition (and catalog) based on this book.
As the conversations moved along (there were 3-4 meetings, I forget the exact number), Robilant + Voena generously agreed on several key points that would make the exhibition an excellent representation of the book:
• This exhibit would be its own thing. I was free to add new artists to the mix, not limited to the roster I assembled for New Surrealism. In doing so, I could focus on some themes that were undercurrents in the book, but make them of major importance in this exhibition. I did not want to repeat myself by making the same artistic statement twice.
• I could add sculpture to the exhibition, a medium which was not a part of New Surrealism, which focused exclusively on painting.
•Because of the tremendous secondary market resources available at Robilant+Voena, we were able to obtain work by canonical, historical Surrealists to include in the exhibit—works by Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Yves Tanguy and Giorgio De Chirico. Not prints, mind you, but real paintings by these artists.
These canonical Surrealist works will be shown alongside the works of the 17 contemporary artists I selected to be in the exhibition. This approach is a bit different from New Surrealism, where I did not mix the historical and the contemporary, but kept them compartmentalized in separate sections of the book. Integrating the two allowed me the opportunity to highlight both the similarities and the differences between the many subsets of the Surrealist experience for different generations.
• The exhibition will travel. When it finishes its run in New York City in mid June 2025, the exhibition will travel to R+V’s Milan location and run for another six weeks in the fall of 2025, starting mid-September.
• The exhibition features its own book, a hardback catalog (cover image at top of post) which includes beautiful images and layout of the 30 works of art in the show, and also a new extensive essay by Zeller that covers some of the newly highlighted themes. It is a sequel to New Surrealism, of sorts, weighing in at roughly 11K words. For comparison, New Surrealism is about 70K words.
For those of you interested in purchasing it, the catalog will be available through Robilant + Voena only. You cannot order it from Amazon or Abebooks. It will be available for purchase at the gallery and/or through their website. You can email them for more information at: enquire@robilantvoena.com
ABOVE: Leonora Carrington “The Lovers” 1987, Oil on canvas 75 x 102.9 cm (29 . x 40 . in.), FAMM Museum, Mougins (France), The Levett Collection
ABOVE: “Nimrod” by Alicia Adamerovich is featured in the Non Objective room of the exhibition
Four Rooms = Four Themes
Because of the four room layout of Robilant + Voena (the old Blum and Poe space at 66 & Madison Ave), I chose four themes from New Surrealism and divided the artists accordingly:
• Uncanny Figuration - featuring the work of :
Leonor Fini
Nicola Verlato
Arghavan Khosravi
Jamie Adams
Laura Krifka
• The Psychic Landscape- featuring the work of:
Leonora Carrington
Norrain Inam
Matt Hansel
Maria Kreyn
Robert Ryan
•The Psychic Interior- featuring the work of:
Giorgio de Chiricho
Lars Elling
Ginny Casey
Lola Gil
Tim Kent
• Non Objective Fragments - featuring the work of:
Yves Tanguy
Alessandro Keegan
Kristy Luck
Alicia Adermovich
Vincent Desiderio
Lola Gil, “Woman” 2025, oil and acrylic on linen, 75 x 120 cm (29 . x 47 . in.)
Robilant+Voena
19 East 66th Street
4th and 5th Floors
New York, NY 10065
7 May – 17 June 2025
Opening May 6, 6-8pm
Robilant+Voena
Via della Spiga
1 20121, Milan
16 September – 16 November 2025