This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte review — an absolute joy

This is a joy. René 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, his imagery working its way into adverts, magazine covers, the whole pop culture Slopageddon.

Stepping into the Gagosian, which has been transformed into a dazzling curtained space, you are reminded of his influence on David Lynch (Twin Peaks’s Red Room but with all the eroticised juxtapositions of formality and the id) but the show is about his continuing influence on contemporary artists, displaying their work alongside the great man’s.

While such an approach killed the Tate’s Frida Kahlo exhibition, here Magritte’s work thankfully makes up the bulk of the show, and the additional works are those that chime with his wit, rather than adopt slavish worship. There is Magritte’s The Flowers of the Journey from his first solo exhibition in 1926 to more famous works like his haters-thumbing self-portrait The Philosopher’s Lamp in which he’s stuck his own penis nose in his pipe and smoking it. Sarah Lucas’s SLAG sculpture makes for fine company here, as do a couple of Jeff Koons pieces and Yoko Ono’s Sky TV, a live feed of the sky above the gallery, echoing Magritte’s famous cloud works.

Everything operates in that funny/not funny way: back out of the Slopageddon, you see the disturbing nature of Magritte’s visions, the loss and disturbance, with death lurking. Here the puppeteering witches in Victor Man’s Titiriteros gaze down on the landscape of Magritte’s Natural Selection, where the clouds sit on the ground and rain upwards — what dark forces are really at play in all this bonkers work?