The real surreal part III: how the light gets in

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition: The real surreal part III: how the light gets in from July 10 - September 5, 2025.

This third part of our trilogy of exhibitions presents other artists involved with our gallery who, independently of any art movement, non-personal agenda or canon have integrated art and especially the process of making art, into the very areas claimed by mainstream Surrealists, who intellectually sought to achieve in their own work automatic writing and drawing, the immediacy of madness, the juxtapositions of diverse materials in unexpected conformations, dreams, psychic phenomena, occult magic, and spiritualism in its varied usages.

We have also included several Contemporary artists to augment this group, trained artists who are not catering to the mainstream canon. The people who create this work follow idiosyncratic iconoclastic paths, mainstream or non-mainstream. We can say the ‘official’ Surrealists made their work ABOUT the phenomena mentioned above, and these non-mainstream artists make their work from within those phenomena.

Jean Dubuffet and André Breton were prophetic in their fields but were not around long enough to observe the contemporary manifestations and new additions to the field. This is particularly true regarding artists of non-Western origin and the African-Atlantic diaspora. The gates are opening in institutions such as the Collection de L’art Brut, Lausanne, and the Pompidou Center (inheritor of Bruno Decharme’s esteemed abcd collection, now on view at the Grand Palais in the exhibition titled Dans l’intimité d’une collection) to continue the work of exposure and information on this magic facet of non-mainstream contemporary art all across the Ethnosphere, as Wade Davis has so fittingly named it.

These are the artists who are also most sensitive and vulnerable to world events. Surrealism was a reaction to, and antidote for, institutional repression of culture and the creative soul. For third-world artists it celebrated the right to personal freedom. Dubuffet at one point called it the work of the ‘common man’ but in truth the common man who makes this work is also the charismatic individual who is a culture bearer for spiritual and visionary knowledge and ancestral information. André Breton sensed this when he added the works of Haitian master and Vodou priest Hector Hyppolite to the Art Brut Collection. It was a shame the paintings were later withdrawn when the collection came to New York. We are making up for that error now by exploring the visionary creatives from ALL parts of the world. This is how the light gets in.

Artists in the exhibition include Angkasapura, José Bedia, J.J. Cromer, Leonard Daley, Nicole Frobusch, Catherine Garrigue, Dagmar Havlíčková, Shneider Léon Hilaire, Davood Koochaki, Olga Karlíková, Loïc Lucas, Přemysl Martinec, Jean-Pierre Nadau, Simone Pellegrini, Andre Pierre, Imam Sucahyo and Anna Zemánková. Sculptors include Chrissy Callas, Rosie McLachlan, Yohei Nishimura, Andrey Tischenko, and Petros Tsakmaklis.