René Magritte

René Magritte (1898–1967) was a Belgian surrealist whose enigmatic and meticulously rendered paintings have become some of the most iconic images in modern art. Renowned for his ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, Magritte’s work invites viewers to question reality, perception, and meaning. With his characteristic blend of wit, mystery, and illusion, he helped shape the visual and philosophical language of the Surrealist movement and remains one of its most recognisable figures.

Magritte’s imagery is as precise as it is perplexing, its hyper-realistic technique deepening the sense of visual contradiction. His paintings often juxtapose everyday objects in unexpected contexts - clouds inside rooms, rain falling beneath a clear sky, or faces hidden behind floating objects. His most famous work, The Son of Man (1964), depicts a man in a bowler hat with his face obscured by a hovering green apple, encapsulating the artist’s enduring interest in concealment, identity, and the unknowable.

René Magritte Biography

Rather than tapping into the subconscious through automatic painting, as many Surrealists did, Magritte’s approach was more cerebral. Analytical and ironic, it used visual puns and logical inversions to unsettle viewers' assumptions about the world. His art explored the gap between language and image, reality and representation, and often toyed with philosophical questions in a visual format, making him as much a thinker as a painter.

Magritte's influence has continued to grow long after his death. In November 2024, his painting Empire of Lights (1954), which depicts a nocturnal street scene under a bright daytime sky, became the most valuable Surrealist artwork ever sold at auction, fetching $121 million at Christie’s New York. His works are now housed in leading museum collections around the world, including Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where they continue to captivate and confound.

Magritte’s legacy lies not only in his technical brilliance and conceptual depth, but in his ability to make the familiar deeply strange; in doing so, reveal just how fragile our sense of reality really is. Through his timeless images, Magritte invites us to see the world not as it is, but as it might be imagined.