Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Surreal America, an expansive group exhibition tracing the many veins of surrealism that proliferated throughout the United States beginning in the interwar period. Comprising paintings, sculpture, and works on paper dating from the late 1920s through the early 1970s, the exhibition features work by fifty-nine artists from nearly every region of the country.

Where the European Surrealists of the 1920s were an organized group with a defined charter—André Breton’s 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme—the movement that emerged in the United States a little less than a decade later was not confined to a single milieu and did not adhere to explicitly defined ideological or stylistic criteria. Art historian Martica Sawin identifies the movement’s nebulous parameters as the key to its indelible influence in America, providing artists with the “license,” or freedom, to experiment with a radically new approach to art, allowing artists to “liberate their art from enslavement to visual facts and readymade styles,”[1] namely the prevailing Social Realist movement, with its didactic mandate, and the dominant modes of abstraction, cubism and neo-plasticism, which had grown increasingly academic in their emphasis on theory. As the ravages of economic blight and political unrest threatened American society with collapse, surrealism provided artists a means to subvert social conventions, resist the strictures of logic, and discover hidden aspects of the self. Brimming with the anxieties, traumas, dreams, and wonders of twentieth-century life in the United States, the works on view in Surreal America testify to the indispensable place the movement holds in the history of American modernism.

A significant portion of Surreal America is dedicated to emphasizing the movement’s essential contribution to the development of abstract expressionism. Works by William Baziotes, Gordon Onslow Ford, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Gerome Kamrowski, Norman Lewis, Richard Pousette-Dart, Boris Margo, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, and Charles Seliger exemplify the biomorphic imagery and automatist practices that were formative to the quintessentially American movement’s adherents. A small but potent work by Charles Howard demonstrates his distinct approach to surrealist abstraction, which reconciles the opposing forces of conscious rationality and unconscious disorder. The sculptures of Leo Amino, Harry Bertoia, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, and Theodore Roszak round out the exhibition’s emphasis on organic abstraction, providing a three-dimensional complement to the biomorphic paintings on view.

The immense impact Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s theories had on the cultural luminaries of the twentieth century is evident throughout the exhibition, but especially in the deeply psychological imagery of Federico Castellon and Jared French, whose masterful draftsmanship is on full display in their enigmatic figurative compositions. The earliest work on view, Untitled (Horse and Pierrot) (1927) by artist, curator, and writer John Graham (born Ivan Gratianovich Dombrowski in Kiev), encapsulates the role that European émigrés played in the proliferation of surrealist ideas in the United States. A major work by Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew, Portrait of Fidelma (Interior Landscape) (1947), further demonstrates this influence and anchors the figural works in the exhibition. As Lincoln Kirstein, founder of the New York City Ballet, poetically described Tchelitchew’s “Interior Landscapes” project, “The muscular, nervous and lymphatic systems woven about lobe and bone and cartilage, are each apparent in their own simultaneous integrity, but the figure cannot be imagined as an ecorché; its throbbing presence shows no stripped cadaver, but a revealed, incandescent existence. Its mosaic of structure and function emerge by parts to blend in a whole, its binding element not blood but light.”[2] An incandescent, spiritual light is also a defining feature of Fountain (1949–50) by George Tooker, another primary artist of Kirstein, Tchelitchew, and French’s milieu, who repeatedly addressed the disconnect between the individual and society.

Benny Andrews’ large-scale collage painting addresses the atrocities of American history with expressive figurative scenes inflected with his own personal symbolism grounded in his experiences as a Black man from the Jim Crow South. Lee Bontecou’s industrially inflected, wall-mounted box sculpture invites viewers to contemplate the yawning void at its center, evoking a mood of existential contemplation. Lucas Samaras’ psychedelic assemblage presents a symbolic exploration of the artist’s psychology and interior life. California artists Betye Saar and Edward Kienholz contribute symbolically loaded assemblages of found materials that reveal the movement’s remarkable range of tone and subject, from an elegant metaphor for mystical practices of prayer and spiritual manifestation, to an acerbic social critique of the vacuous fallacy of the American dream. An important predecessor to the assemblage practices of the 1960s, Joseph Cornell, is well represented with Flemish Princess (c.1950), a quintessential box diorama that invokes a range of associations representative of his myriad interests and interpretation of the world.

Perhaps the most iconic encapsulation of surrealism’s legacy in the middle decades of the twentieth century is Nancy Grossman’s celebrated leather-clad head sculptures, a prime example of which, Untitled (1968), was created in the same year as another example of the series, Head, featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Sixties Surreal exhibition opening September 24, 2025. Expressing the artist’s angst at society’s misrecognitions—and ironically mistaken for a commentary on S&M subculture when they were first exhibited—Grossman’s heads embody a foundational concern of the surrealist project. As she famously stated, “Your head, which is the seat of your hang-ups, is also your most powerful organ.”[3]

Since the gallery’s founding in 1989, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has had a long history of exhibiting surrealist American art. In 1990, the gallery presented Surrealism & Magic Realism in American Art, which was followed by Surrealism Embodied: The Figure in American Art, 1933–1953 (1992) and Exploring the Unknown: Surrealism in American Art (1996). In more recent decades, the gallery has mounted Unconscious Unbound: Surrealism in America (2010) and Otherworldliness (2012), as well as solo exhibitions on surrealist artists including Federico Castellon, Boris Margo, Irving Norman, Alfonso Ossorio, Charles Seliger, Theodoros Stamos, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Theodore Roszak.