Surrealism

Discover Victor Brauner's world, a strange and colourful world, teeming with symbolic and mythical figures. Bornon June 1903 in Piatra-Neamt, Rumania.
His father was involved in spiritualism and sent Brauner to evangelical school in Braïla from 1916 to 1918. In 1921 he briefly attended the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he painted Cézannesque landscapes. He exhibited paintings in his subsequent expressionist style at his first solo show at the Galerie Mozart in Bucharest in 1924. Brauner helped found the Dadaist review 75 HP in Bucharest. He went to Paris in 1925 but returned to Bucharest approximately a year later. In Bucharest in 1929 Brauner was associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist review UNU. Victor Brauner settled in Paris in 1930. He was close to Brancusi, Giacometti and Tanguy and soon joined the Surrealist group. For André Breton, he was to be the "magic" artist par excellence. A painter of premonitions, he could also be subversive and ironic and created unusual images haunted with chimerical creatures.Andre Breton wrote an enthusiastic introduction to the catalogue for Brauner's first Parisian solo show at the Galerie Pierre in 1934. The exhibition was not well-received, and in 1935 Brauner returned to Bucharest, where he remained until 1938. That year he moved to Paris, lived briefly with Tanguy, and painted a number of works featuring distorted human figures with mutilated eyes. Some of these paintings, dated as early as 1931, proved gruesomely prophetic when he lost his own eye in a scuffle in 1938. During the war years he was obliged to use makeshift materials such as wax which was to prove exceptionally well-suited to expressing his particular vision. At the outset of World War Il Brauner fled to the South of France, where he maintained contact with other Surrealists in Marseilles. Later he sought refuge in Switzerland; unable to obtain suitable materials there, he improvised an encaustic from candle wax and developed a graffito technique.Right up to the end of his life Brauner continued to improve on his technique and use of wax, combining the rusticity of the material with sumptuous refinement when dealing with colour.

Brauner returned to Paris in 1945. He was included in the Exposition internationale du surréalisme at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947. His postwar painting incorporated forms and symbols based on Tarot cards, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and antique Mexican codices.

After breaking away from Surrealism in 1948, the artist developed an increasingly personal style. He devoted himself to passionate introspection and borrowed both from primitive art and occult science to express universal archetypes.
In the fifties Brauner traveled to Normandy and Italy, and his work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and in 1966. He died in Paris on March 12, 1966. ...

(PLease Login to see the complete biography.)