Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Organized religion was one of the many institutions that came under question in the 1960s. For many artists, the search for alternatives led to the exploration of expansive forms of spirituality, influenced by cultural roots, ancestral knowledge, and the occult. Many practitioners of historic Surrealism promoted esotericism and the magical sciences as tools for unlocking the subconscious mind and critiquing the dominant institutions—family, church, and state—of the period. The artists gathered here follow that line of thinking to various critical ends. Some, such as Jordan Belson and Ching Ho Cheng, sought spiritual knowledge by using meditation, psychedelic drugs, and divination as tools for elevating consciousness. Others, including Claes Oldenburg and Eduardo Carrillo, looked outward, questioning the dominance of religious institutions and reappropriating conventional iconography for new ends. Still others, such as Oscar Howe and Carlos Villa, evoked ritual practice in their work to assert claims to cultural identity and counter the destabilizing effects of colonization and Christianity upon Indigenous systems of belief.

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A diagram with Latin words, a triangle, and circles showing elements, humanity, God, and Satan in a symbolic layout.

Although Wally Hedrick appropriated the central diagram of HERMETIC IMAGE from a sixteenth-century alchemical book, when asked about the painting's religious connotations, he asserted that there were none: "the image was what interested me." In divorcing the figure from its magical origins, he created an image that engages with a Pop Art sensibility, in which the schematic becomes a formal, graphic exercise. Hedrick's work exemplifies the San Francisco countercultural proclivity for using mystical themes and non-Western systems of belief to launch an assault on rational thought.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Wally Hedrick, HERMETIC IMAGE, 1961

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