Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art

Nicholas Hall is pleased to present Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art, organized in collaboration with David Zwirner and presented at its gallery location on West 20th street in New York. This exhibition takes as its point of departure Alfred Barr’s legendary 1936 exhibition at MoMA  Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which not only introduced these movements to the American public for the first time, but also placed them in a historical and cultural context by situating them with artists from earlier centuries. Drawn from international museum and private collections, Endless Enigma will include works from the twelfth-century to the present day.

The exhibition will provide a unique opportunity to examine affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time. Endless Enigma will explore the ways artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth and religion. Works on view range from twelfth-century gargoyles from France; masterworks from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Giuseppe Arcimbolo, Herri met de Bles, Hieronymus Bosch, Piero di Cosimo, and Titian; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works by Damiano Cappelli, Pietro Novelli, and Salvator Rosa; nineteenth-century works by William Blake, James Ensor, Francisco Goya, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and James Ward; and works from the twentieth century to the present day by Jean Arp, Eileen Agar, Louise Bourgeois, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Robert Gober, José Gutiérrez Solana, Sherrie Levine, René Magritte, Roberto Matta, Pablo Picasso, Wallace Putnam, Man Ray, Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy, Luc Tuymans, and Lisa Yuskavage, among others.