LONDON.- Colnaghi, London, opened Dreamsongs: from Medicine to Demons to Artificial Intelligence, a group exhibition which examines the way dreams have been depicted in art from antiquity to the present day.
Curated by Bjorn Stern, the presentation is comprised of more than forty paintings, drawings, sculptures and multi-media works by a diverse range of artists, including Jan van Wechelen, Frederick Charles Underhill, Takis, Salvador Dali, Albrecht Dürer and Max Ernst.
The arrangement of the show loosely falls into the five categories of the dream identified by the Latin scholar Macrobius in response to Cicero’s poem: insomnium, visium, somnium, oraculum and visio. Adds Stern: ‘The exhibition also features stone carvings, vases, porcelains, clocks, books and multimedia works. In choosing these and other objects, I am seeking to break away from chronology or a stylistic hierarchy, to let the experience of entering the exhibition be akin to entering a dream sequence. To this end, the works are arranged in conversation, while stylistically they may clash, with the aim of offering new perspectives and teasing out fresh interpretations.’
Continues Stern: ‘As knowledge in our time has become worthless and accessible at all times by all, the transference of knowledge to wisdom has also taken new paths - much in the same way a brain would compensate for any damage, or a newly added tool that forms new synapses and connections, we arrive at our present. Where much of the ordinary thinking processes are handed over to artificial intelligences, so does the machine also begin to dream. Not in the human sense, but perhaps in the humanist sense.’
Says Colnaghi CEO Jorge Coll. ‘We are delighted to be working with Bjorn on this show. His drawing together of works from different periods of art history uncover the way artists have interpreted the dream in an insightful and thought-provoking way.’
An iteration of Dreamsongs will be displayed simultaneously at the gallery’s virtual stand at Frieze Masters online from 9 — 16 October.
Artists: Reza Aramesh, Shuvinai Ashoona, Bill Barrett, Jennifer Bartlett, Barton Lidice Beneš, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, William Blake, Peter Blake, Rudolphe Bresdin, Anne Brigman, Glenn Brown, William Burroughs, Alexander Calder, Jean Joseph Carriès, Monster Chetwynd, Eduardo Chillida, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Salvador Dalí, Raymond Daussy, Konstantino Dregos, Evelyn Dunbar, Albrecht Dürer, Max Ernst, Luis Feito, John Anster Fitzgerald, Jean-Louis Forain, Tsuguharu Foujita, Henry Fuseli, Francisco Goya, Thomas Heatherley, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Mario Klingemann, Guillermo Kuitca, Juan Leal De Valdes, René Magritte, Marcel Mariën, John Martin, André Masson, Master of Frankfurt, Roberto Matta, Jillian Mayer, Reuben Mednikoff, Luc Olivier Merson, Jean-François Millet, John Minton, Joan Miró, Estrid Lutz & Émile Mold, Pierre Molinier, Tadeusz Myslowski, John George Naish, Godwin Champs Namuyimba, Pedro Nunez Del Valle, Amédée Ozenfant, Grace Pailthorpe, Samuel Palmer, Savinien Petit, Odilon Redon, John Robinson, Salvator Rosa, Henri Rousseau, Walter Sauer, Hiraki Sawa, Jan Schoolmeesters, Mark Seidenfeld, Luigi Serafini, Raqib Shaw, Smack, James Smetham, Kiki Smith, Annegret Soltau, Henry John Stock, Graham Sutherland, Takis, Dorothea Tanning, Antonio Tàpies, Jean Tingueli & Eva Aeppli, Jan Toorop, James Turrell, Frederick Charles Underhill, Andy Warhol, Adolfo Wildt, Hugo Wilson, Otto Wols, Hermann Wöhler, Adolf Wölfli, Joos van Cleve, Jan van Wechelen, Cajsa von Zeipel, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski; and others.
