Radical rethinking, cultural resistance, and a desire for revolution and disruption are staged when ARoS opens this year's major exhibition A Surreal Shock - Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen on 7 October 2023. Visitors are offered a comprehensive introduction to Surrealism and the opportunity to experience some of the most popular works of art of the last hundred years. 

The exhibition is curated in collaboration between curator at ARoS Jakob Vengberg Sevel and curator Els Hoek from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and presents over 200 works including 180 important Surrealist artworks from the Boijmans collection. Among others by Eileen Agar, Joan Miró, Leonora Carrington, Man Ray, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí. 

We are proud to collaborate with Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which has one of the world's most important collections of Surrealist works. With this collaboration, we have the pleasure of giving our visitors here in Aarhus the opportunity to experience magnificent Surrealist works and to explore first-hand the fantastic, automatic, and subconscious experiments of Surrealism to challenge the status quo, says Rebecca Matthews, Museum Director at ARoS. 

From the 1920s Surrealists developed a methodology, aesthetic, and agency for works that exorcised the horrors of wars, and political instability pervading society at the time. 

It might be said we exist in similarly searching times as we grapple with a world in political flux, ecological collapse, and uncertain truths. I am sure, visitors will recognise the ethos of Surrealism; its celebration of imagination retains its spirit of cultural resistance and resolutely resonates in our time, says Rebecca Matthews. 

Importantly, the exhibition at ARoS features several significant works by Danish Surrealists from ARoS' celebrated collection and other lenders across Denmark. Artists such a Rita Kernn-Larsen, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen, and Wilhelm Freddie create a close and rarely seen dialogue with some of their international contemporaries. The juxtaposition allows visitors to see the many similarities, but also some of the differences between the Danish and international Surrealists. 

Art created to provoke 

Surrealism was first described by French writer André Breton who, in 1924, wrote Manifeste du Surrealisme, which argued for the liberation of man from rational society, which he believed had failed. For Breton and the artists who gathered around him in post-World War I Paris, logic, and rationalism were the cages in which imagination, emotion, dreams, and genuine experiences were trapped. 

Led by these thoughts and nurtured by the atmosphere created by the emerging studies of psychoanalysis – in particular Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams – the Surrealists experimented with a wide range of expressions and techniques that enabled their subconscious to run wild. Artists tackled taboo subjects such as gender, sexuality, and death; they used automatic drawing and deployed collage techniques to tear apart commonly accepted rational assumptions. 

In their time, the Surrealists created controversy and outrage: Their focus on sexuality, social revolution and the dissolution of classical artistic forms of expression were provocative. The Surrealists attacked common narratives and searched for alternatives, just as we see once again in much contemporary art, says Jakob Vengberg Sevel, Head of Collection and Curator at ARoS. 

In the exhibition, more than 200 works are exhibited ranging from painting, sculpture, collage, and assemblage, to books, drawings, prints, photography, and film. 

Reintroduction of Danish Surrealism 

A Surreal Shock – Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen reintroduces early Danish Surrealism, which for many years has existed in the shadow of the CoBrA movement. 

Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Ejler Bille, Richard Mortensen, and Sonja Ferlov shaped the formative years of Surrealism in Denmark, most clearly articulated in the publication Linien. 

Today, Richard Mortensen is widely recognised for his contructivist painting, while Ejler Bille is less prominent among the CoBrA artists. Bjerke-Petsersen's major contribution to the introduction of Surrealism to Denmark has been largely forgotten in the years after World War II. 

The exhibition at ARoS allows the artists to possess a more prominent place in Danish art history. Danish Surrealism is characterised by international openness and a rich flow of ideas, which subsequently created a fertile breeding ground for a Danish avant-garde art scene in the 20th century, says Jakob Vengberg Sevel. 

A Surreal Shock - Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is on view at ARoS from 7 October 2023 - 21 January 2024. 

The exhibition is realized with generous support from the A.P. Møller Foundation. The exhibition year 2023 is supported by the Augustinus Foundation. 

Press photos can be freely downloaded from Dropbox when giving due credit.

For additional information, please contact:

Astrid Ildor
Press and Communications Manager, ARoS 
(+45) 61 90 49 42
asil@aros.dk