Tattoo – Stories from the Mediterranean

Catalog of the exhibition at Mudec, Museum of Cultures in Milan from March 22 to July 30, 2023

The Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum’s Surrealist collection is unique and world-famous; it includes works by the greats such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Man Ray and chronicles an entire artistic movement, offering an extraordinary wealth of objects, drawings and splendid graphic series, rare books, periodicals, and posters.

The large selection of masterpieces tells the visitor what the main premises and motivations of the Surrealists were: using found objects, automatic techniques or game-like rules, the artists attempted to exclude the rational, hoping to create a poetic shock that would change the world.

The exhibition and catalog are enriched by an original focus on the Surrealists’ interest in non-Western cultures, drawing on works from the Mudec collection for the occasion.

ELS HOEK – Curator of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum. An art critic, researcher and editor of art programs, she has curated exhibitions and published a study (2020) on American artist James Lee Byars. She has produced two series of the Boijmans TV program on the Rotterdam museum and has been involved in the Boijmans ARTtube online video platform, producing and directing videos on art and design. She is currently developing content for Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen.

ALESSANDRO NIGRO – Associate professor of History of Art Criticism at the University of Florence. A specialist in the historical avant-garde and the genre of portraiture, he has studied non-Western arts with reference to the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. He is the author of the monograph Surrealist Portraits and Self-Portraits (Padua, 2015), focusing on photography and photomontage, with essays on André Breton, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Claude Cahun, and edited an issue of the journal “Mélusine” devoted to the internationalization of Surrealism (2022).