Dalí, Magritte, Miró, Man Ray, and Picabia on a journey

On display from October 27th in the Fondazione Ferrero in Alba, Italy.

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The famous Surrealist collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, with masterpieces of Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Francis Picabia and many others, has traveled to Italy for a special exhibition.

‘Dal Nulla al Sogno’ is a new traveling exhibition by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. From this Saturday, 27th of October, till 25 February 2019 it will be on show in the Fondazione Ferrero in the city of Alba, Italy. ‘Dal Nulla al Sogno’ contains a selection of 149 Surrealist pieces from the museum in Rotterdam.

In 2016, the traveling exhibition ‘Bruegel’s ‘The Tower of Babel’ and Great 16th Century Masters’ proved a great success in Japan with over 650.000 visitors. Now, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen offers another tailor-made exhibition to a foreign institute, providing the Fondazione Ferrero in Alba with a unique Surrealist collection of extraordinary paintings, objects, drawings, magazines and books. Some well-known artworks that have traveled to Italy are the ‘Mae West Lips Sofa’ of Dalí, Magritte’s ‘La reproduction interdite’, and ‘Egoism’ by Picabia. Moreover, the exhibition showcases a broad selection of Surrealist pieces from the museum’s library. Fondazione Ferrero expects to welcome 200.000 visitors to ‘Dal Nulla al Sogno’. Some of the Surrealist masterpieces will, upon their return to Rotterdam in February 2019, be back on display in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – side to side with other Boijmans showpieces like Pieter Bruegel’s ‘The Tower of Babel’, and Jheronimus Bosch’s ‘The Wayfarer’.

‘From Nothingness to Dreams’

Every two years, the Fondazione Ferrero organizes an exhibition that is free for all to visit: this time, Italian curator Marco Vallora compiled the exhibition ‘Dal Nulla al Sogno’, with 149 pieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Its title, ‘Dal Nulla al Sogno’ (‘From Nothingness to Dreams: Dada and Surrealism from the Collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’), refers to the anti-art of Dadaism, its ‘nothingness’, and the consequential development to the visual dream of Surrealism.

The Surrealist museum of The Netherlands

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen started building its extensive collection of Surrealist art in the 1970s. While other Dutch museums focused on the cool Modernism of Northern Europe, Boijmans turned its gaze towards the developments in Southern cities like Brussels, Paris, and Madrid. The museum organized exhibitions on Man Ray and René Magritte, and in 1970 it showcased the first retrospective exhibition of Salvador Dalí’s work: a premiere within Europe. Dalí’s very own attendance at the show’s opening resulted in enormous publicity. Visitors queued for hours so they could marvel at the remarkable exhibition. By 2018, the Surrealist collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen contains over 125 artworks, plus an exceptional collection of rare books and publications. It attracts art lovers from all over the world to Rotterdam.

BVB Collections

On an annual basis, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen loans around 500 artworks to museums worldwide. Such exchanges do not only serve the reputation of the museum and its collection abroad but are also meant to incite lovers of art and culture with a desire to travel to Rotterdam and discover the collection in The Netherlands. In 2016, the museum started BVB Collections: traveling exhibitions, like the one in Japan and now in Alba, Italy. In the years to come, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen intends to collaborate intensively with museums and institutions all over the world.