Victor Brauner, the Magical Adventure

From 3 July and for six months, the Nouveau Musée de Monaco dedicates the spaces in the Villa Paloma to a major figure in international Surrealism, Victor Brauner (1903–1966), a singular and special artist in the history of art, whose remarkable body of work remains to be discovered. For the very first time, “Victor Brauner, the Magical Adventure” reveals an exceptional private collection based in Monaco that encompasses the artist’s entire production from the 1920s to the 1960s, covering painting, drawing and sculpture. Serving as a counterpoint to more than one hundred and sixty works from this collection, ten non-Western objets d’art collected by Victor Brauner, on loan from the Musée d’art modern et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, are also on display.

Victor Brauner’s work is at once original, erudite, highly inventive and full of humor. Drawing on his Romanian origins and the Bucharest avant-gardes, his encounter with André Breton and Surrealism from 1933, as well as diverse archaic civilizations and mythologies, he composed a wonderful visual laboratory of metamorphoses that sourced inspiration from his love of esotericism, ultra-secret dogmas, the German Romantics and non-Western arts. Bearing witness to an ever-evolving world, his fascinating, enigmatic creation moved from autobiography to mystery in a desire to achieve universality. This polymorphous body of work (painting, drawing, sculpture, objects…) is a testament to his abundant construction of objects, devised by the artist to conjure up his inner universe and the surrounding world. In a bid to cut himself off from reality, Victor Brauner created legendary worlds in which fantasy and wonder cohabit, occasionally tinged with irony to escape the barbarity around him or magnified by magic to establish a personal cosmogeny. Despite experiencing the weight of history, as did other foreign artists in the early part of the century, Victor Brauner carried on inventing all his life long, with consummate tenacity and generous originality.

In 1941, Victor Brauner confided: “every drawing and every discovery will be an extraordinary unknown place, every painting will be an adventure”.

“Through a unique private collection that presents one of the most singular and spellbinding corpuses of the 20th century, the exhibition devoted to Victor Brauner in Monaco wishes to share the magic of this great artist with as many people as possible,” states Camille Morando, the exhibition curator.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Hatje Cantz.

Curated by Camille Morando
Exhibition design: Christophe Martin