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Alan Koppel Gallery is pleased to announce our exhibition of Exquisite Corpse drawings. Various masters of the Surrealist movement created each of the 14 original drawings. Andre Breton, Rene
Magritte, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Paul Eluard, and many others casually collaborated in a living room or a bar to create these unplanned and nonsensical masterpieces. Evidence of the relaxed
atmosphere is visible on the stained and creased paper that they passed between each other.
Invented by the Surrealists in the 1920s, Exquisite Corpse is a game played as members of a group assemble an assortment of words or images without knowledge of the other players’ contributions. The name “exquisite corpse” is derived from the resulting phrase of a completed round played by the Surrealists: “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.” (The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.)
To create an exquisite corpse using images, a sheet of paper was folded into as many parts as necessary based on the number of people participating. The players would then draw their image without seeing the other drawings. The end result was a mismatch of unrelated images that literally illustrated the main objective of Surrealist art: reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so thoroughly that the world of dream and fantasy are incorporated into the everyday rational world in an absolute reality—a surreality.
For more information, please call the Gallery at 312-640-0730 or visit our website at www.alankoppel.com.
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