Max Ernst (1891–1976) was a key figure of Dadaism and one of the founders of Surrealism, who worked in Germany, France, and the USA. He studied art history, philosophy and psychiatry, and as a self-taught artist developed “automatism,” one of the main concepts of Surrealism. A painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet, he brought a series of new techniques to art practices, such as collage, frottage, grattage, decalomania, and oscillation, a forerunner of the ‘action painting’ of the American Abstract Expressionists.
Rebecca Horn (b.1944), a leading German artist and filmmaker, carries Surrealism into contemporary art. Like Max Ernst, she operates as an inventor-artist, metamorphosing the world and its creatures in her works. Her bizarre devices, body costumes, and mechanisms, including machines that produce art and music, embody the surrealistic concept of automatism.
