Yves Tanguy – The Mirage of Time, 1954

by Atelier Liesjes

One of Tanguy’s last major works — he died in 1955. * 'The Mirage of Time' — 'De luchtspiegeling van de tijd' — verwijst naar de illusoire aard van de tijd zelf: de fata morgana als metafoor voor het verstrijken van de tijd, die we menen te zien maar nooit kunnen vasthouden. In zijn late periode werden Tanguys landschappen complexer en dichter, de vormen rijker en meer driedimensionaal. De ruimte is dieper, de schaduwen preciezer, de biomorfische objecten meer gestapeld en vertakt dan in zijn vroege werk. 'The Mirage of Time' * has the quality of a summary: it is as if the artist had brought his entire inner world together in a single image. Yves Tanguy (1900–1955) was a French-American surrealist painter, born in Paris. Self-taught and without any formal art training, he was inspired in 1923 by a painting by Giorgio de Chirico that he saw from a moving bus. He joined the Surrealist group led by André Breton and developed a visual language entirely of his own: vast landscapes of an unknown planet, populated by biomorphic forms — soft, flowing objects reminiscent of stone, bone and organic tissue. Tanguy emigrated to the US in 1939, married the Surrealist artist Kay Sage and died in Connecticut. His works are among the most unrecognisable and influential in Surrealism.