Discover surrealism art for sale. Our collection features the contemporary artists putting a modern spin on the medium, with vivid, imaginative pieces. Shop today to buy surrealism art, including surrealist paintings, surrealist drawings and surrealist collage.
Digital artist, Philip McKay reimagines Dali’s telephone in A New Machine, where his giant Photoshopped phone dwarfs the tiny figures walking towards it on the beach. In Waiting For The Rain, he nods again to Magritte with a figure, suspended in the clouds, who keeps hold of his hat and umbrella, despite missing his head.
The influence of Magritte is also evident in Peter Horvath’s Untitled (Marlboro Man). The Canadian collage artist distorts the iconic image of the brooding, macho cowboy, tracing Margritte’s fine line between familiar and bizarre by distorting the well-known advert.
Alexandra Gallagher is another artist who uses collage to distort reality. The artist’s fantastical landscapes combine classical nudes with unexpected digital edits and natural forms. In Gallagher’s work Entropy (2023), a multi-limbed figure appears in free fall, entwined with flowers, snakes and birds. Neon colours and digital linework are layered on top of an art historical landscape, creating a surreal interplay between old and new.
Discover more Surrealism artists here including our female surrealist artists.
About Surrealism art
Born in 1924, the surrealist art movement had its epicentre in Paris and its goal was to liberate human experience from the boundaries of rationalism. Its co-founder, the artist and poet, André Breton, studied Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and was fixated on the idea that the unconscious mind was the source of human creativity. That’s why surrealist artists used techniques to allow their subconscious to express itself freely. Automatic drawing, for example, was said to be a way to let the subconscious take charge by letting the hand move freely or randomly across the page.
These techniques may have been more ambition than reality. It was Joan Miró who said in 1952, “I was drawing almost entirely from hallucinations.” However, traces of grids can be seen beneath some of the Catalan artist’s works, suggesting these paintings had been meticulously planned.
Salvador Dalí is the movement’s most famous artist. His well-known surrealist paintings feature dystopian dreamscapes and bizarre motifs, such as his lobster telephone or his iconic melting clocks. But it was Dali’s ability to merge these otherworldly images into his realistic style, making his artwork at once both strange and familiar.
The combination of strange and familiar was also evident in the work of surrealist, René Magritte. The Belgian’s deadpan style makes peculiar subjects seem at first normal; prompting a distrust in the viewer. His images of the headless man in a bowler hat are well-known and in The Spirit of Geometry, Magritte also swaps the heads of a mother and baby, resulting in an effect is both comic and unsettling.
