The word ‘Surreal’ has filtered into everyday language to describe the strange or bizarre, yet its origins are rooted in a movement that erupted in 1920 Paris. This movement championed the disputable force of dreams and desires and confidently demanded a new declaration of man’s rights.

Surrealism, often labelled as fantastical, bizarre, or otherworldly, is frequently associated with impossible visions that belong in the realm of dreams rather than reality. But is this perception genuinely accurate? Suppose we take a deeper dive into the core of surrealism. In that case, we uncover something more profound: surrealism is not distant from reality—it directly reflects it, albeit through abstract and unconventional forms. This art movement offers us an unfiltered glimpse into the human psyche, emotions, and experiences, more deeply connected to our world than we might initially think.

The Abstract Mirror of Reality

Surrealist artists paint, write, and create based on the emotions, thoughts, and dreams we experience as humans. These creations are not mere escapes from reality; they are expressions of reality within us, albeit in layers that often remain buried beneath our conscious minds. Surrealism reveals these layers, bringing them to the surface in unexpected ways. What makes it so powerful is not its detachment from reality but its unique approach to showing what is real yet unseen. Surrealism exposes our innermost fears, desires, and dreams, giving form to the abstract.

At the heart of surrealism lies the notion that reality itself is subjective. What we experience as “real” is shaped by our emotions, thoughts, and perceptions—things surrealism captures without the constraints of logic or reason. It is art in its purest form, tapping into the human experience in ways that challenge conventional understandings of truth and illusion.

Frida Kahlo: The Surrealist of Personal Reality

Take, for instance, Frida Kahlo. Kahlo is often aligned with surrealism, though she famously rejected the label, asserting that her work was not about dreams but her lived reality. Yet, this reality—unfiltered, raw, and deeply personal—aligns her with the movement.

Kahlo’s paintings explore her inner self, marked by immense physical and emotional pain. From her tumultuous relationship with Diego Rivera to the traumatic bus accident that left her body broken, every brushstroke reflects her struggle. The self-portraits that dominate her oeuvre are not just representations of her likeness but are surreal depictions of her inner world. In The Broken Column (1944), Kahlo paints herself with an open torso, revealing a crumbling column in place of her spine. Her face remains stoic, yet tears line her cheeks—a simultaneous portrayal of strength and vulnerability, physical suffering, and emotional endurance.

Kahlo’s work is not distant from reality; it is, in fact, a deeper dive into it. She transforms her inner world into something tangible by bringing her pain, heartbreak, and emotional turmoil to the canvas. It is surreal but also a testament to the rawness of lived experience. Her emotions are not hidden but splayed open for all to see.

“I Paint My Own Reality”

René Magritte: Subverting the Everyday

René Magritte, on the other hand, offers a different approach to surrealism. His work is grounded in the familiar—objects we encounter daily—but presented in ways that make us question the reality we take for granted. In Magritte’s paintings, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the known becomes unknown.

Consider The Son of Man (1964), one of Magritte’s most iconic pieces. A man in a suit and bowler hat stands before us, his face obscured by a floating green apple. The man is a faceless figure, yet dressed in the attire of normalcy, making him simultaneously recognisable and unknowable. Magritte’s surrealism lies in this tension—between the visible and the hidden, the ordinary and the strange. In his hands, everyday objects become symbols of the human condition, reflecting how we conceal and reveal ourselves.

Magritte’s works play with the boundaries of reality, subtly suggesting that there is always more than what meets the eye. He presents us with visual riddles that force us to confront the absurdity of what we consider normal, making us question whether reality is as straightforward as we perceive it to be.

“Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”

Salvador Dalí: Dreaming in Reality

Then there is Salvador Dalí, perhaps the most recognisable surrealist. Dalí famously painted his dreams, which, while fantastical, are deeply rooted in the reality we all experience. They emerge from our subconscious minds, reflecting our fears, desires, and memories in often more truthful ways than the rational thoughts we entertain during waking hours. In this way, Dalí’s art becomes a mirror of our inner worlds, making it deeply relatable.

Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931), with its melting clocks and surreal landscapes, evoke a sense of otherworldliness. Yet, these dreamscapes are not detached from reality—they are extensions of it. Time, after all, is a construct we experience differently in our minds, and Dalí’s depiction of time in a fluid, malleable form speaks to how it feels in moments of intense emotion or reflection. His works do not seek to escape reality but to stretch it, to show how pliable it can be when viewed through the lens of the subconscious.
For Dalí, dreams are a doorway into a different kind of reality—a real is still a part of the human experience. His Surrealism confronts us with the notion that what we consider unreal is a fundamental aspect of our existence, a truth hidden beneath the surface of everyday life.
Surrealism: Reality Revealed

Surrealism accepts reality but moulds its visions, as we see in the works of Kahlo, Magritte, and Dalí.
It scoops deeper, peeling away the layers of mundane existence to reveal the complex, often uncomfortable truths of human emotion and perception. These artists do not create impossible worlds—they reveal the world as it is, in all its strangeness, complexity, and beauty. The transformative power of Surrealism can inspire us to see the world in a new light, peel back our own layers, and reveal our true selves.

Surrealism challenges us to see that the boundaries between reality and fantasy, the tangible and the intangible, are not as rigid as we might believe. Through this lens, Surrealism becomes the closest artistic movement to presenting our true selves—raw, unfiltered, and endlessly fascinating. In the end, Surrealism is not the art of the unreal; it is the art of the unseen reality that exists within us all.

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

Although the most well-known representatives of Surrealism are visual artists, the surrealists were not initially concerned with developing their ideas through visual arts. Instead, they focused their attention on writing and poetry, and it was André Breton, a surrealist writer and poet, who shaped the world of Surrealism. Who defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism” in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924