Monacelli Studio
2024 marks the 100th anniversary of surrealism, an enduring movement the poet André Breton sparked in 1924. Countless artists across disciplines have been inspired by the uncanny, unconscious, and fantastic, a few of which are celebrated in a book written by Robert Zeller.
New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting, chronicles the history of the artistic and political movement from its birth amid World War I to more contemporary interests. Featuring major influences like the aforementioned Breton, Sigmund Freud, and the Dadaists, the 336-page primer travels through the century to highlight the artists, exhibitions, and events that profoundly impacted the genre. The book highlights surrealist icons like Remedios Varo, Salvador Dalí, and Leonora Carrington, along with artists working in the tradition today, including Arghavan Khosravi, Miles Johnston, and Ewa Juskiewicz, whose portrait of a swathed woman graces the cover.
Robert Zeller is a visual artist and writer who received a BFA from a joint program of the Boston Museum School and Tufts University and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Following his bestselling The Figurative Artist's Handbook (2017), New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting is his second book published by Monacelli Studio. He contributed a chapter about Surrealist photography to the exhibition catalog Photography: Real and Imagined (2024), profiling the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and has also written for The Brooklyn Rail and other influential art periodicals and blogs. In 2009, he founded The Teaching Studios of Art, an in-person and online art school devoted to instruction in figurative art. Zeller maintains a studio practice in Brooklyn, New York, and is the recipient of two Posey Fellowships and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has curated group exhibitions and shown his own work at galleries in the United States and Europe.
