There’s no shortage of demand for René Magritte right now, and Gagosian is ready to meet it.
This September, the mega gallery will mount a major show in London dedicated to the artist and his lasting influence. “This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte” will have around 70 works by the Belgian Surrealist and dozens of contemporary artists inspired by him. Many of the new works are being made for the exhibition.
Organized by curator Jasper Sharp and Bernard Lagrange of Gagosian Art Advisory, the show comes 20 years after “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images” (2006–07), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art‘s landmark group exhibition designed by artist John Baldessari that traced the Surrealist’s influence on postwar American and European artists.
The upcoming show’s location is poignant. The 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition was staged just down the street from Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill location, at the New Burlington Galleries, a watershed moment for Surrealism that helped cement Magritte’s name.
“He’s a rare artist that’s managed to become culturally iconic beyond the art world,” Lagrange told me in a phone call with Sharp. “The darker, stranger underbelly of his aesthetic is what continues to inspire artists today, especially as we live through a moment where there is this return to a figurative and surreal exploration in painting and sculpture.”
Gagosian has not yet released a full list of artworks or the names of the contemporary figures, but the show will include more than 20 Magrittes, some for sale and some on loan from major collections. They include , which the artist made just ahead of the 1936 Surrealist exhibition and appeared in LACMA’s show. The painting depicts Magritte smoking a pipe by candlelight, his overgrown nose snaking into the pipe’s bowl. He wrote of it: “The meditations of an absent-minded, obsessive philosopher may conjure up the image of a mental world closed in upon itself as, in this case, the smoker is the prisoner of his pipe.” Other Magrittes with his most iconic motifs—apples, bowler hats, clouds, and of course more pipes—will be peppered throughout.
René Magritte’s (1954), which sold for $121 million at Christie’s.
The contemporary artists in the show will be “surprising,” Sharp said, ranging from established figures in their 80s and 90s to some fresh out of MFA programs, including many not usually associated with Surrealism. The intent is not to link their work with similar Magritte pieces directly, but to draw a conceptual line through the artists’ practices, he said. (The LACMA show had a Robert Gober cigar sculpture beside Magritte’s own painting of a cigar, for instance. That’s not what they’re going for here.)
The Belgian artist’s market has soared in the last five years, according to the Artnet Price Database, reaching an all-time high of $312.3 million in auction sales in 2024. That year, his (1954) went for $121.2 million at Christie’s New York, becoming the most expensive Surrealist work ever sold at auction. Last month, La Belle Promenade, a 1965 gouache, made £16 million ($21.2 million) at Sotheby’s London, a 627 percent jump from when it last traded in 2014.
It’s not just collectors who are passionate about the artist these days. “You’d be surprised how often Magritte is invoked in studio visits lately,” Sharp said. “The thought has crossed our minds that the most contemporary artist in the entire exhibition is probably going to be Magritte himself.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
