Todd Schorr, American Surreal Exhibition at San Jose Museum of Art & New Book by Last Gasp

The San Jose Museum of Art has a new exhibition “Todd Schorr: American Surreal” that is a retrospective of the amazing work by Los Angeles based surrealist painter Todd Schorr. The show runs from June 20th through September 16th.

Schorr is a leading figure in Southern California’s cartoon-based movement, dubbed “Pop Surrealism,” which embraces low-brow culture and a ribald graphic style indebted to pop sources such as Mad magazine. Schorr’s astonishing, highly polished realism, (inspired by Bosch, Brueghel and Dali), sets him apart from his best-known peers such as Camille Rose Garcia, Gary Baseman, and Mark Ryden. The exhibition, curated by SJMA’s Senior Scholar and Curator of Collections Susan Landauer, is accompanied by a book published by Last Gasp, San Francisco.

On Thursday, July 16th the San Jose Museum of Art is hosting “Todd Schorr Surreal Night”, a panel discussion and book signing with Todd Schorr sponsored by Hi-Fructose.

The exhibition is conjunction with the release of American Surreal: The Art of Todd Schorr, a new book by Last Gasp that also serves as a catalog for the show.

This is the latest collection of paintings by one of contemporary surrealism’s most influential artists. American Surreal picks up where Dreamland, Schorr’s previous bestselling collection of mind-bending paintings, left off. The viewer can look forward to countless hours of eye bulging investigative thought while examining the impeccably rendered subject matter that has become the hallmark of Schorr’s outrageous vision.

One of the seminal figures in what has come to be known as the Lowbrow or Pop Surrealism art movement, Schorr has continually and systematically set the bar ever higher in his quest to bring classic old master painting technique to his pop-culture-infused subject matter. This latest collection continues that journey culminating with the epic masterpiece Ape Worship, included in this volume. Schorr’s paintings are the subject of museum retrospectives in 2009 and 2010, and are highly prized and coveted by collectors the world over. American Surreal is sure to satisfy those with an overly-developed visual appetite.

San Jose Museum of Art has a series of video interviews with Todd about his work.

The Parade of the Damned, 2004