The Mystery of the Ordinary

Belgian artist René Magritte created the 20th century’s most and indelible images. Seeking to make “everyday objects shriek aloud,” or make the familiar unfamiliar. Magritte used displacement, transformation, metamorphosis, and the “misnaming” of objects as well as the representation of visions seen in half-waking states, consistently unsettling the balance between nature and artifice, truth and fiction, reality and surreality. His images force us to question the nature of appearances both in the paintings and in reality itself.