Rene Magritte

One of Magritte's most famous images, Son of Man addresses the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present - everything that we see hides another thing, yet we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. We long to view the details of the man's face but are denied this view by the ever-present green apple.

This thought provoking image plays with ideas of reality and illusion as we witness a bouquet of flowers that serves as a window to the outside world. The bouquet depicts a field of blossoming buds, perhaps hinting at the origin of the flowers that ultimately end up in a vase in our homes.

Magritte jump started his artistic career designing wallpaper, and his knack for repetitive forms in a rhythmical pattern shines through in this engaging work. Addressing one of his favorite subjects - the bourgeois man in a bowler hat- we witness these men vertically arranged in the sky either falling downwards or suspended in air.

Fascinated with repetitions of the same motif, Magritte conveys two very different objects, the bird and the forest, detailed in the same motif of branches and foliage. This motif establishes a mental and visual connection between these two seemingly unrelated objects, leading us to question their relationship.

Painted for the one man show at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels in 1931, this work addresses a recurring paradox in Magritte's works: the idea of showing a canvas on which the landscape behind it is reproduced. The canvas serves as a window into the outside world and addresses the difficulty of art to convey meaning.

In Magritte's eyes, weightlessness could easily overcome the forces of gravity with a little imagination. This castle in the sky rests upon a hovering rock, appearing as an image from a fairy tale in which we are transported to another realm - one in which the laws of physics are nullified.

Pitting the scientific against the poetic, Magritte defies gravity with his weightless subjects. Against all reason, a large rock hovers in air besides a fluffy cloud, leading us to question the laws of physics.

Presenting what he refers to as "the solution to the problem of water," Magritte depicts a boat composed of water sitting upon water against a brilliant clouded sky. The majestic sea nearly appears to have no end in this magnificent work, perhaps implying that water is a necessity that abounds everywhere.

This mind-bending work invites the viewer to enter another realm, leaving behind the realistic and entering the fantastic. A recurring motif in Magritte's works, we witness a certain paradox or contrast between space and time, as the foreground conveys a night scene and the background appears illuminated in a daytime glow.

Addressing the dislocation of space and time, Magritte depicts two of his favorite subjects: the sky and a bird. We witness the simultaneous occurrence of day and night with the soaring bird serving as a window to the cloud-speckled daytime sky and are left in a dreamlike state, not sure of what we are seeing.

Coined by Magritte as a "defiance of common sense," this striking work evokes the strangeness and ambiguity apparent in reality. Placing ordinary objects in an unusual context, this disorienting work makes us question our own perceptions of reality and how we view our everyday lives.

One of a number of works entitled Megalomania that Magritte produced in the 1940-60s depicting three hollow parts of a woman's body stacked into each other like a set of Russian dolls, this work appears as a giant puzzle, constantly shifting. One of Magritte's favorite subjects was the female torso, and he here addresses this subject in an unusual manner, breaking the female body into disjointed segments.

Exemplifying what Magritte calls "differences of a spatial order," this stunning image distances art from the outside world. The easel, a recurring motif within Magritte's work, signifies the difficulty of artwork to convey meaning. Magritte encourages us to ponder the real versus the imagined by placing a framed image of a forest within a shroud of trees, leading us to wonder if the art itself is placed within the forest that it depicts.

Created after Magritte's last painting prior to his death in 1967, this significant work evokes a sense of the circle of life, in which the tree lies within a leaf that was likely plucked from the tree itself. In the context of Magritte's life, we sense contrasting themes of youth and maturity, creation and destruction, and abundance and barrenness, as he perhaps knew that his time was coming to an end.