Yves Tanguy

Yves Tanguy had no formal artistic training when, in 1923, he saw a painting by Giorgio de Chirico from the platform of a Paris bus and immediately resolved to become a painter. Welcomed into the inner circle of Surrealism by André Breton, he mastered an immaculate, hyper-smooth illusionistic technique.

Tanguy's paintings present alien, submarine-like plains stretching toward boundless luminous horizons, inhabited by mysterious bone-like and petrified biomorphic entities casting sharp, uncanny shadows. Emigrating to Connecticut with American Surrealist Kay Sage in 1939, his compositions grew increasingly complex and architectonic.