Surrealism

Through political upheaval and global turmoil, Mexican artists developed a unique form of surrealism that reflected the psychological anxiety of the time and remains current in our own time. Carlos Orozco Romero's painting Dream depicts a hallucinatory urban landscape by radically distorting the scale of the elements within the composition and forcing its perspective. Through its disquieting atmosphere and distorted point of view, it calls to mind the paintings by De Chirico but elements such as the white stucco wall are typically Mexican. Although it was painted soon after Andre Breton declared that Mexico was the surrealist country par excellence, this painting and earlier works by Orozco Romero and his colleagues illustrate the fact that Mexican artists had been experimenting with surrealist ideas long before Breton's famous visit in 1938.