Elle Decoration
UK
Anima Coffee Table by Lara Bohinc for STUDIOTWENTYSEVEN
This Month
We live in an increasingly surreal world, so it seems only fitting that Surrealism (the art movement that turned 100 last year) is having a growing impact on interiors. Are you ready to get strange?
The Inspiration
Challenging conventions and defying logic, Surrealism aims to unlock the mysteries of the unconscious. Steeped in symbolism – think salvador dalí’s melting clocks or Max ernst’s birds – it has a dream-like quality that often occupies unrecognisable spaces. That is less true of the work of rené magritte, the belgian artist who was interested more in the strangeness of the familiar. ‘I don’t paint visions,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘to the best of my capability, by painterly means, I describe objects – and the mutual relationship of objects – in such a way that none of our habitual concepts or feelings is necessarily linked with them.’ perhaps his best known work is the treachery of images (with the famous LINE, ceci n’est pas une pipe), but the domestic otherness of personal values (below), painted in 1952, possesses qualities reflected in interiors right now: playfully subversive and influenced by the boom in ai-created imagery – very much today’s playground for surrealist design
