There is yet more to Magritte: An afterlife at Gagosian
The Belgian artist was already being compared to his peers and followers before his death. Gagosian's retrospective fittingly continues the dialogue.
Honor Cockroft
René Magritte once said: “We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance.” Entering the Gagosian’s new exhibition, we step into a theatrical scene quite aside from the vast, airy Christo installation that preceded it. The white walls of the Grosvenor Hill gallery have been layered with pooling, pleated curtains, trapping artworks within their folds, and creating a liminal threshold with which to simultaneously conceal and reveal.
This tension becomes the organising principle of the Gagosian’s latest exhibition: This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte, an ambitious homage to the late, great René Magritte and his enduring influence on the history of art. The exhibition, in collaboration with Fondation Magritte, assembles paintings, works on paper and sculpture by the Belgian artist, placed in conversation with more than forty contemporary artists.
And there are plenty of Magritte works to encounter, perhaps for the first time. The artist’s earliest canvas dedicated solely to a cloud-filled sky, La Malédiction (The Curse), 1931, is on show; its familiar flashes of white fluffy clouds drawing your gaze across the large opening room. Nearby, dawn and dusk co-exist in a variation of Magritte’s L’Empire des lumières (Dominion of Light) series, punctuated in this 1961 version by the familiar motif of the bourgeois ‘everyman’ adorned with a bowler hat.
The exhibition’s name, of course, comes from Magritte’s The Treachery of Images series, featuring the pipe which has become one of the artist’s most enduring images. The title image sits spotlit and isolated in a wood-panelled passageway that joins the exhibition’s two large rooms. A simple tobacco pipe is illuminated, rendered in Chinese ink on paper and accompanied by the French: Ceci continue de ne pas être une pipe. The image is only ever an image.
This Is Still Not a Pipe marks 90 years since the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition was held a few streets away at the Burlington Galleries. The landmark exhibition helped to consolidate the international reputation of Magritte, among other surrealists, with works such as the gouache version of (La lampe philosophique) The Philosopher’s Lamp, 1936.
Here, in the oil-on-canvas version, a man, bearing more than a resemblance to Magritte himself, eyes the viewer with a knowing look in what is widely considered to be a self-portrait. The man’s nose curls with phallic flair into yet another paradoxical pipe, whilst beside him, a melting candle snakes down and around a table. A prisoner to his pipe, the lyrical title compares the obsessive, repetitive nature of a smoker’s habit to that of the philosopher’s mind.
Months before, the surrealist poets André Breton and Paul Éluard, had declared “poetry is a pipe”. And just as his painted reconciliation of night and day was inspired by Breton’s L’Aigrette, so much of Magritte’s imagery was shaped by the exchange of philosophical and artistic thought that he encountered in Paris in the late 1920s and later crystallised on his canvases.
But whilst surrealism often deals in the chaotic and dreamlike, Magritte’s works are rooted in the everyday. What subverts them is the shifts in scale: the monumental becomes miniature, and the miniature monumental. By disrupting the familiar proportions and positioning of everyday objects, Magritte challenges our mode of perception. A poetic shock.
This generosity to everyday objects is convincingly echoed in the convergence of objects or ‘props’ staged in each room, from the giant Pink Pearl Eraser of Vija Celmins, to the scaled down stainless steel train of Jeff Koons. As well as evoking Magritte’s obsession with railways, the bourbon-filled carriages add a conceptual element (i.e. remove the bourbon, and this is no longer a Koons).
Koons is one of several artists whose work also featured in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images exhibition 20 years ago, which traced Magritte’s impact on post-war artists. Alongside Koons, the Gagosian includes works by Ed Ruscha, Robert Gober, and the recently passed Betye Saar, whose works have been held in dialogue with Magritte before. As the Gagosian catalogue outlines: “It seems, perhaps, that the afterlife began early”.
It is in this afterlife where the success of this show lies. Beginning with Georges Thiry’s photograph (The Funeral of Magritte, 1967), we are presented with the Gagosian’s take on his influence. Where other examples fail, this exhibition is richer for its contemporary pull, choosing artists that share in Magritte’s more palatable surrealism and wit. Works such as Allison Katz Brussel Sprouts (and Phillip) No. 4, 2025 evoke a sense of play, whilst Anna Weyant’s My Pony, 2019 hints at the stronger, darker underbelly of his work which continues to pervade wider visual culture.
The exhibition’s installation further reinforces this reading. The first room is visibly Lynchian, draped with deep midnight blue and crimson curtains - it’s Blue Velvet meets Twin Peaks. As we move through, the curation verges on the simplistic: nudes are grouped, dots are echoed and the analogous colour scheme, a repeating pink and blue palette, avoids deep contrasts.
Finally, we arrive at Magritte’s ‘vache’ period wherein for a short, provocative time, in his life and in the show, the artist intentionally rebels against a ‘surrealist orthodoxy’. It is against the backdrop of these crude works (think lurid colour, vulgar expressionist strokes, and imagery verging on the grotesque) that we understand what this show is doing. In our age of hyperlegibility, it highlights the fallibility of both the artist and the image.
In typical Gagosian style the artworks, unaccompanied by wall text, speak for themselves and the show, unencumbered by context, focuses more on imagination and invention than explanation. Presented as a loop (you must walk back through the exhibition to exit), the Gagosian shows that there is yet more to exhaust in Magritte’s imagery.
This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte runs until December 12 at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill.
