Rene Magritte

One of Magritte's most famous images, Son of Man addresses the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present - everything that we see hides another thing, yet we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. We long to view the details of the man's face but are denied this view by the ever-present green apple.

Presenting what he refers to as "the solution to the problem of water," Magritte depicts a boat composed of water sitting upon water against a brilliant clouded sky. The majestic sea nearly appears to have no end in this magnificent work, perhaps implying that water is a necessity that abounds everywhere.

Magritte returns to the notion of things seen and obscured in this pretty, green print. The artist plays with texture and repetition in one of his most successful graphic works.

This thought provoking image plays with ideas of reality and illusion as we witness a bouquet of flowers that serves as a window to the outside world. The bouquet depicts a field of blossoming buds, perhaps hinting at the origin of the flowers that ultimately end up in a vase in our homes.

Magritte jump started his artistic career designing wallpaper, and his knack for repetitive forms in a rhythmic pattern shines through in this engaging work. Addressing one of his favorite subjects - the bourgeois man in a bowler hat- we witness these men vertically arranged in the sky either falling downwards or suspended in air.

Fascinated with repetitions of the same motif, Magritte conveys two very different objects, the bird and the forest, detailed in the same motif of branches and foliage. This motif establishes a mental and visual connection between these two seemingly unrelated objects, leading us to question their relationship.

In Magritte's eyes, weightlessness could easily overcome the forces of gravity with a little imagination. This castle in the sky rests upon a hovering rock, appearing as an image from a fairy tale in which we are transported to another realm - one in which the laws of physics are nullified.

Pitting the scientific against the poetic, Magritte defies gravity with his weightless subjects. Against all reason, a large rock hovers in air besides a fluffy cloud, leading us to question the laws of physics.

Created after Magritte's last painting prior to his death in 1967, this significant work evokes a sense of the circle of life, in which the tree lies within a leaf that was likely plucked from the tree itself. In the context of Magritte's life, we sense contrasting themes of youth and maturity, creation and destruction, and abundance and barrenness, as he perhaps knew that his time was coming to an end.

In this playful nude, Magritte renders the female body with all of its parts separated. A flat, polished seascape stretches into the horizon behind the subject, evoking calm in the face of absurdity.

This mind-bending work invites the viewer to enter another realm, leaving behind the realistic and entering the fantastic. A recurring motif in Magritte's works, we witness a certain paradox or contrast between space and time, as the foreground conveys a night scene and the background appears illuminated in a daytime glow.

Magritte depicts leaves suspended in the air, a glowing yellow moon hovering in front of the scene. This special work combines the calm of a starry night with the magical imagery of dreams.

With characteristic polish Magritte creates an image of the world as a giant pearl or flower bud. His image evokes the universe's vast scale with typical wit.

What in another artist's hands would have been a still life is here transformed into a visual puzzle. Bright reds, greens and blues add vibrancy to this scene within a scene.

This intimate piece shows a hazy winter sunset unlike any other. The twinned rock and cloud invite closer inspection.

Combining many familiar images from Magritte's career, this mysterious print intrigues the viewer. The man in a bowler hat and the silhouette filled with blue sky set an enigmatic tone.

Both mysterious and light-hearted, this unusual landscape actually pays homage to a 5th century Greek philosopher. Its blue overtones evoke a sense of calm and timelessness.

Derived from the famed statue Venus de Milo, Magritte reappropriates this monumental work in his own surrealist style, giving new life to one of the most beautiful works of sculpture from Antiquity.

Placing an everyday object of fruit in an unusual context, Magritte endows these masked apples with a distinct sense of liveliness and affection. Drawing in close to one another, these apples engage both with each other and with their surroundings.

The sky blue visage of a serene and beautiful woman ethereally floats in space. Reminiscent of the imagery found in Magritte's La Mémoire paintings, this work addresses the often elusive nature of the mind and the memories that it acquires.

Capturing an element of mystery and intrigue, this striking sculptural work features a masked apple that is at once both accessible and distant, a curious object placed in an unusual context.

This striking sculpture conveys the sentiment that there is life within a musical instrument. Placing a violin atop the starched bow tie of its player, Magritte substitutes the instrument for the player's face, once more encouraging us to broaden our understanding of objects in relation to space and time.

Utilizing one his favorite motifs, Magritte transforms his 1960 painting La Joconde into a mesmerizing sculpture. Magritte saw the depiction of drapes in particular as representative of a divide between different ways of seeing, addressing two of his favorite questions: How do we see things and can we trust what we see?

Addressing the dislocation of space and time, Magritte depicts two of his favorite subjects: the sky and a bird. We witness the simultaneous occurrence of day and night with the soaring bird serving as a window to the cloud-speckled daytime sky and are left in a dreamlike state, not sure of what we are seeing.

Coined by Magritte as a "defiance of common sense," this striking work evokes the strangeness and ambiguity apparent in reality. Placing ordinary objects in an unusual context, this disorienting work makes us question our own perceptions of reality and how we view our everyday lives.

One of a number of works entitled Megalomania that Magritte produced in the 1940-60s depicting three hollow parts of a woman's body stacked into each other like a set of Russian dolls, this work appears as a giant puzzle, constantly shifting. One of Magritte's favorite subjects was the female torso, and he here addresses this subject in an unusual manner, breaking the female body into disjointed segments.

Exemplifying what Magritte calls "differences of a spatial order," this stunning image distances art from the outside world. The easel, a recurring motif within Magritte's work, signifies the difficulty of artwork to convey meaning. Magritte encourages us to ponder the real versus the imagined by placing a framed image of a forest within a shroud of trees, leading us to wonder if the art itself is placed within the forest that it depicts.