The Magritte Machine

The #museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is holding the first retrospective in #Madrid on the Belgian artist and leading Surrealist René #Magritte (1898-1967) since the exhibition held at the Fundación Juan March in 1989. Its title, The #Magritte machine, emphasises the repetitive and combinatorial element present in the work of this painter, whose obsessive themes constantly recur with innumerable variations. Magritte’s boundless imagination gave rise to a very large number of audacious compositions and provocative images which alter the viewer’s perception, question our preconceived reality and provoke reflection.

Curated by Guillermo Solana, the museum’s artistic director, The #Magritte machine is benefiting from the collaboration of Comunidad de #Madrid and features more than 95 paintings loaned from institutions, galleries and private collections around the world, thanks to the support of #Magritte Foundation and its president Charly Herscovici. The exhibition is completed with a selection of photographs and amateur films by #Magritte himself which is part of a traveling exhibition curated by Xavier Canonne, director of the Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi, and which will now be shown in a special installation. After its presentation in #Madrid The #Magritte machine will be seen at the Caixaforum in Barcelona from 24 February to 5 June 2022.

“My paintings are visible thoughts”

In 1950 René #Magritte and some of his Belgian Surrealist friends produced a catalogue of products of a supposed cooperative society, La Manufacture de Poésie, which included items intended to automatise thinking and creation, including “a universal machine for making paintings,” described as “very simple to use, within the reach of everyone” and which could be used to “compose an almost unlimited number of thinking paintings.”

The painting machine had precedents in avant-garde literature, such as those devised by Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, forerunners of Surrealism whose inventions emphasised the physical process of painting, albeit through opposing concepts: in the former’s the machine revolved and sprayed out jets of paint in all directions, while the latter’s resembled a printer that produced photo-realist images. The device described by the Belgian Surrealists is different and was intended to generate images that were aware of themselves. The #Magritte machine is a metapictorial one, a machine for producing thinking paintings and ones that reflect on painting itself.

“Since my first exhibition, in 1926 [...] I have painted a thousand paintings, but I haven’t conceived more than a hundred of those images which we’re talking about. These thousand paintings are the result of the fact that I’ve often painted variants of my images: it’s my way of better defining the mystery, of possessing it better.”

Further information in the press release to download