This Is Still Not a Pipe: Magritte's influence examined in hoot of show

This is a joy. Magritte – fond of bowler hats, apples, and saying pipes are not pipes – is one of the most recognisable and loved artists, certainly the most palatable of the surrealists these days, his imagery working its way into adverts, magazine covers, the whole pop culture Slopageddon. This Is Not A Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte, works by showing his importance without being too precious about it.

Stepping into the Gagosian, which has been transformed into a dazzling curtained space, you are reminded of his influence on David Lynch (Twin Peaks’ Red Room but all the disturbed/eroticised/funny juxtapositions of formality and the id, as well as some outright lunacy) but the show is specifically about his influence on contemporary artists, and takes the risk of displaying their work alongside the great man’s.

While such an approach killed the Tate’s Frida Kahlo exhibition, here Magritte’s work is in the majority and the new work shown is more about artists who follow a similar strain of wit, rather than adopt slavish devotion. There are plenty of Magritte classics and intriguing rarities, you’ll find The Flowers of the Journey from his first solo exhibition in 1926 and The Listening Room (1958) with the large house-filling apple, and his haters-thumbing self-portrait The Philosopher’s Lamp (1936) in which he’s stuck his own penis nose in his pipe and smoking it. His half-fish, half-cigar, The Exception (1936) charms the socks of you until it kind of weirds you out, and... what’s it the exception to, anyway?

This is Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte

Gagosian

Sarah Lucas’ SLAG, all stuffed tights and tragedy, makes for fine company here, and in fact the sculptures present threaten to steal the show: Isabelle Albuquerque Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 7 (2021) where a couple of teddy bears ravish a woman’s body made from black locust hardwood; Jeff Koons’ shiny stainless steel toy locomotive; Vija Celmins Pink Pearl Eraser (1966–67); Soshiro Matsubara’s Der Traum des Schmetterlings (2018–26), a tragic woman-faced bird flat on its back. There’s also Magritte’s very own hat and suitcase, which are intriguing in themselves, like Wes Anderson artifacts (another cinematic filcher). Also among the sweetshop of oddities is Yoko Ono’s Sky TV, featuring a live feed of the sky above the gallery, echoing Magritte’s famous cloud works, represented here with The Curse (1931). Again though, why is a perfectly nice bit of cloud and blue sky, a curse?

René Magritte Le Lieu commun (The Commonplace), 1964

Gagosian

It’s not simply Magritte’s titles that undercut the apparent playful levity. Coming up against them face-to-face is to recognise that liberated from the image fatigue of Slopageddon, these paintings are disquieting in the extreme. Where curtains fall in the middle of the ocean, a woman’s blonde hair frames a figure made of a cage door, and where the double image of a bowler hatted man, one containing a house, the other a hedge, is called The Drums of Death (1965). The longer you spend with them, the more their disturbances, the transfigurations of things turning into things they shouldn’t, sneaks under your skin. His work is engaging but dangerous. In The Blow to the Heart (1952) a rose wields a dagger.

On the walls, the contemporary art for the most part complements Magritte well. Here the puppeteering witches in Victor Man’s Titiriteros (2023) gaze down on the landscape of Magritte’s Natural Selection (1938) where the clouds sit on the ground and rain upwards – what dark forces are really at play in all this bonkers work? You’ll have a great time finding out. Until you do.