Press release

From Dalí and Miró to Ponç and Tàpies via Picabia, Calder, Domínguez and Hugnet, this exhibition aims to delve into the place dreams occupy in the creative process of artists in the post war period, their openness to the different states of the observing conscience and their attempts to capture waking dreams in paint or words. Each artwork has been selected for its power to surprise, nourish or entrap the imagination; to provoke a rebellion of the mind.

Humanity’s deep-rooted fascination for dreams experienced a turning point at the beginning of the 20th century after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud (1900), a fundamental work of reference which definitively marked the scientific, philosophical, literary, poetic and artistic meaning of the word. In the aftermath of each of the subsequent world wars, artists and writers responded to Freud’s work on the unconscious and free association with increasing radicalism until the syntax of the visual and literary world was blown apart.

The Surrealists, who adopted the concept of dream as a leitmotiv around which many of the principles of the movement revolved, undertook a journey of no return into the oneiric world. The dream became a deep well from which to subjectively experience an alternate reality, an awakening, in which automatism, metamorphosis, imagination, impulse, freedom prevailed.