Contextual Studies - Lesson 3

Our third lesson in contextual studies involve us going over the work of surrealism and the impact it had when it started to how we see it nowadays.

The best way to understand surrealism is that it is a form of escaping from the real world and along with creating a new language in the way we see objects in paintings therefore making people think in a way they don’t want to all or that was uncommon at the time. However surrealism has lost its shock value as the public has become desensitised to it and is just seen as being normal by today’s standards, this could be mostly seen in the way that surrealist paintings are reused in pop culture such as in Alfred Hitchcock’s film spellbound.


Surrealism in itself can be hard to understand but I feel the best way of understanding it is to imagine a world in which the ideas of surrealism makes sense and to question how everything works if it was real. An example of this is the animated short “Destino” which was a collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney. The animation was done in the classic Disney style with references to many of Dali’s paintings.

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