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 Catholic nun turned full-time artist, Barbar Rossi was intimately familiar with the visual language of religious iconography. In Male of Sorrows #5, she reinterprets the archetype of the Man of Sorrows—an iconic Christian devotional image that depicts the wounded body of Christ. Her graphic style took inspiration from both the bold linework of late medieval German woodcuts and the fantastical and, at times, humorous work of her artistic contemporaries in Chicago. Her absurd appropriation of this conventionally sobering icon of piety reflected larger culture shifts away from the dictates of the Catholic Church and organized religion more broadly.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Barbara Rossi, Male of Sorros #5, 1970

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