Six Dark and Dangerous Gallery Exhibitions On View Now In New York

1. See Delta blues musician, gravedigger and artist James ‘Son Ford’ Thomas's incredibly crude, but morbidly beautiful sculptures that are often made with real teeth and hair, on view at 80WSE Gallery 2. Female pop artist Marjorie Strider begs you to come hither and see some of her early masterpieces on view now at Broadway 1602 3. Deborah Kass reimagines Andy Warhol's 13 Most Wanted Men at Sargent's Daughters 4. Viewer DISCRETION...children of BATAILLE, curated by Kathleen Cullen, presents a group show of artists as disparate as Hans Bellmer, Max Snow and Picasso for an exhibition that explores erotica and the "permutations of our own desires."  5. Seth Price presents almost 80 works of art, with mediums such as airbrush and polymer paint, at Petzel Gallery 6. Los Angeles based photographer Torbjørn Rødland gets religious and erotic with his tongue-in-cheek, groin tingling work on view at Algus Greenspon. 

Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams

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Victor Brauner, Romania/France 1903–66, Loup-table (Wolf-table) 1939, 1947, Wood and taxidermied fox

This June marks the beginning of a unique, expansive exhibit of surrealist artwork in Queensland, Australia. The Gallery of Modern art in Queensland, a land far from the birth of surrealism, is borrowing "the core" of one of the finest and largest collections held at the The Musée national d’art moderne in at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Its a rare occasion in that the collection rarely leaves Paris.  The exhibition presents more than 180 artworks by 56 artists, including paintings, sculptures, ‘surrealist objects’, films, photographs, drawings and collages. Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams is on view June 11 to October 2 at the The Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland - www.qag.qld.gov.au.

Required Reading: Lautréamont's Maldoror

"The deadly uses of this book will lap up his soul as water does sugar." In 1917 French writer Philippe Soupault discovered a copy of Comte de Lautréamont's manuscript Les Chants de Maldor in the mathematics section of a small Parisian bookshop, near the military hospital to which he had been admitted.. Lautréamont, which was the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, born in Uruguay 1846 and died in Paris in 1870, was immediately canonized as a surrealist god - in the pantheon of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarme.  "Chants de Maldoror unveils a world, half vision, half nightmare, of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites, and homosexuals, madmen and strange children."  Right now at the Galerie Anais in the Bergamont art space in Santa Monica, California a small exhibit of inspired drawings by the the similarly morbid artist Hans Bellmer - The Songs of Maldoror and Erotic Series is on view until March 31st. www.galerieanaisla.com