Surrealist tendencies (1930-1940s)

Surrealism was, and still is, a strong artistic movement that first emerged in literature and poetry, and ultimately in the visual arts. Surrealism was defined by the French poet André Breton as a spontaneous and rationally uncontrolled testimony of what is happening in the human subconscious. Breton himself even came to lecture in Czechoslovakia in1935 at the request of the Czech Surrealists.

Among the Czech Surrealists was the painter Toyen, whose real name was Marie Čermínová. In her work, she developed and interpreted reality on the boundaries between erotic art and abstraction using automatic drawing, interpreting printed colour spots, or placing a suitable structure on the image area. Flowers of Sleep, from 1931 which we can now see, is a typical surrealistic inspiration from the fantasy world of the unconscious. From the flat vague background of the imaginary landscape, plastic neoplasms and mysterious objects - such as shells, eggs, stones, eyes, ropes that are loosely clustered in space - emerge from the author's subconscious. The connection of the human brain with the threads from fabrics and fragments of crystalline rocks on a mysterious background gives the viewer no peace and defies any rational explanation.