Blain|Di Donna is getting ready to present as its inaugural exhibition, Dangerous Liaisons, a survey of paintings, works on paper and objects by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte.
What'll you see at this noteworthy exhibit is over twenty five major oils, gouaches and drawings. This is the first Magritte show of this scale to be presented in New York in almost fifteen years, and comes at a time of renewed interest in Surrealism and its key exponents.
The exhibition’s title is derived from Magritte’s seminal early work, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1935), an enigmatic painting thought to have been inspired by the eighteenth century French novel of the same name, in which two rival lovers deploy sex as a weapon to humiliate others. As with many of the works in the artist’s oeuvre, it delights and disturbs in equal measure; uncanny, poetic, playful and erotic, it underlines his unsettling ability to pull at the threads of philosophical and psychological certainties, and in doing so eloquently sets the tone of the exhibition as a whole.