Catalog / Marc Chagall / The awake dreamer

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) went down in art history as a painting dreamer. In his colorful works, the laws of gravity and logic seem to have been suspended. Like hardly any other artist, he succeeds in transforming reality into a romantic dream world in which people and fantastic creatures float through pictorial spaces together. In Chagall's works there is no separation between the religious and the secular. The artist grew up in the tradition of Hasidism, a Jewish revivalist movement. According to Hasidism, there is nothing in which God is not. The artist's pictorial worlds show how naturally and virtuously Chagall interwoven the humanity of biblical stories and the wondrous of everyday life. The exhibition catalogue, with its texts accompanying drawings and graphics, delves deep into the artist's fantastic dream world and at the same time traces his sources of inspiration in the real world.

Marc Chagall: an individualist and painter, whose style is unique and inimitable. His colorful works seem to defy the laws of nature – the force of gravity is repeated, logic suspended. With numerous paintings, colored drawings and prints, the present volume delves deeply into Chagall's romantic dream world, while at the same time tracing his sources of inspiration in the real world and clarifying the autonomous position of his oeuvre within contemporary art.