Unlock Art: Exploring the Surreal

Unlock Art is a collaborative project between Tate and Le Meridien hotels that tackles various art movements through 8 witty short films.  After missing out on a couple of the recent events, I was finally able to make it along again last month to the launch of the latest film in the series – Exploring The Surreal.

This time around fellow Scot Peter Capaldi took the helm to delve inside the mysterious surrealism art movement.  Peter tells the story from the beginning way back in 1924 Paris right through to its current day influences.  The theorist Sigmund Freud Surrealism set the tone with his psychoanalytic book The Interpretation of Dreams.

Capaldi explains “A lot of surrealist art is about sex, that’s because Freud believed the primary motivation for all things in life was sex – he changed his mind later.”

Of course the master of and unquestionably most famous of the surrealists, Salvador Dali is central to the film, it also looks at the quirky lifestyles of other members of this art fraternity in the usual light-hearted manner that we have come to expect from the film series.