Surrealism and mythology: how Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and other artists’ imaginations were captured by myths shown in new exhibition

We all need myths, whether as a way to better understand the world and humanity or as comfort in face of grief and anguish. A century ago, the artists of the Surrealist movement, battling the trauma of war, also needed myths.

“Mythologies: Surrealism and Beyond – Masterpieces from Centre Pompidou”, which opened on May 21 at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, expounds on these ideas.

The exhibition, which is a highlight of this year‘s French May Arts Festival, is curated by Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the National Museum for Modern Art at Paris’ Pompidou Centre, and is split into eight sections. It dives into various myths that captured the imagination of Surrealists, from the Minotaur and Chimera to the Surrealists’ own creation, the headless Acephale. The exhibition also includes response works by two Hong Kong artists, Keith Lam and Hazel Wong.

The Surrealists sought to free humanity from the shackles of rational thought and liberate the unconscious mind, which they saw as the source of creativity. One of the figures they looked up to was Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, who plumbed Greek mythologies to explain human desires and behaviour, Ottinger says. Freud’s hold on the Surrealists can be seen in Luis Buñuel’s 1930 satirical film L’age d’Or (The Golden Age), the title referring to a period of peace and prosperity in Greek mythology. Amid the barrage of surrealist imagery, viewers are served a blistering attack on the Catholic Church and modern society.

In the exhibition, the Minotaur, a half-bull, half-man figure, is simultaneously a figure of excess – seen in Pablo Picasso’s Bacchanal Scene with Minotaur (1933-34), where the creature cavorts with humans – and the loss of reason, epitomised by French artist Andre Masson in The Labyrinth (1938).