Venancio Shinki - Surrealism

Venancio Shinki (April 1, 1932 – November 17, 2016) was considered one of the most outstanding Peruvian painters. He was born in Supe, Lima, Peru.His father (Kitsuke Shinki of Hiroshima Prefecture) was Japanese and had arrived to Peru in 1915. His mother was Peruvian (Filomena Huamán of Huari, Peru).He was born and raised on the Hacienda San Nicolás in Supe, north of Lima. At that time, Supe attracted a large concentration of Japanese immigrants. He has 3 children from his first marriage to Keiko Higa.
He started participating in collective expositions since 1963 in Peru and other Countries. In 1966 he won the Teknoquimica award. In 1967 he received the National Award in Painting "Ignacio Merino"  He has received many accolades and has participated in a variety of individual and group exhibits in Peru, Japan, Italy, United States, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, and Mexico, among others.
His work was inspired partly by travels through Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, but in its symbolism it also reflected his admiration for the works of Bosch, El Greco, Klee and Mir; with its subtle range of tones and textures and its undefined forms it also expressed elements of his Japanese heritage. His paintings have a mixture of Eastern, Western, and Andean themes, with a distinctive surrealism that shows an intriguing and unknown universe, set off by a purified technique and a renovated figuration. Wikipedia

Wolfgang Lettl - Surrealism

Wolfgang Lettl (18 December 1919 – 10 February 2008) was a surrealist painter who was born and who died in Augsburg, Germany.In 1939, at the age of 20, Wolfgang joined the German Army and served as a communications officer in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1943, during which time he worked on his watercolours and first became exposed to surrealism. Later in the war, he became a reconnaissance airman in Norway, where he was captured at the end of the war and held for four months.He returned to Augsburg in 1945, and worked there as a freelance painter from 1945 to 1948. In 1949, however, the currency reform forced him to turn to construction work to make ends meet. He continued working on his landscapes, portraits and surrealist art while working construction jobs and odd jobs. From 1954 onwards, he was able to concentrate on his art.He married Franziska Link in 1949.Success with his freelance art led him to develop his surrealism, and in 1963 he participated in the Grosse Kunstausstellung München (the "Grand Art Exhibition Munich"), becoming a member of the Neue Münchener Künstlergenossenschaft ("New Munich Artists' Cooperative Society"). One-man shows in Germany and abroad followed. In addition to his surrealist work, the landscapes around his second home in Apulia, Italy, inspired him to sometimes paint in an impressionistic style.In 1992, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition at the Toskan Hall of Columns, he offered his paintings to the city of Augsburg on permanent loan. After the opening of the "Lettl Atrium - Museum for Surreal Art" in Augsburg in 1993, Lettl has concentrated on experiments in other media (including film), as well as continuing with his painting. A major retrospective exhibition was held in Augsburg in 2000. Wikipedia

Jacques Herold

"Jacques Hérold, painter, printmaker, illustrator, and sculptor, was born Herold Blumer in the town of Moldavia, Romania on October 10, 1910. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest between 1925 and 1929. Not wanting to become an academic painter, Hérold abandoned his formal education and became an architectural draftsman. During this time, he discovered the avant-garde artists' publication 75HP, which inspired him to travel to Paris in 1930.
Upon his arrival in Paris he changed his name to Jacques Hérold. He worked for Constantin Brancusi and met Victor Braun, Yves Tanguy and André Breton and, in 1934, he officially joined Breton's Surrealist group. Hérold exhibited at the Salon d’Automne beginning in 1936, and, in the late 1940s, his work was included in all the major Surrealism exhibitions. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1947. In the 1950s, Hérold studied under Stanley William Hayter at his experimental workshop Atelier 17 alongside Europe’s leading experimental printmakers.
Hérold was also an illustrator and he designed covers and illustrations for more than eighty books by renowned authors. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique; the Musuem of Modern Art, Liege; the Musée Cantini, Marseilles; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderne e Contemporanea, Rome; National Museum of Modern Art, Centre George Pompidou; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
Jacques Hérold remained an active artist until his death in Paris on January 11, 1987. In 2010, the Musée Cantini in Marseilles mounted an exhibition, Jacques Hérold et le Surréalism."(annexgalleries.com)

Surrealism - Edgar Ende

Edgar Karl Alfons Ende (23 February 1901 – 27 December 1965) was a German surrealist painter and father of the children's novelist Michael Ende.
Ende attended the Altona School of Arts and Crafts from 1916 to 1920. In 1922 he married Gertrude Strunck, but divorced four years later. He remarried in 1929, the same year his son Michael was born. In the 1930s Ende's Surrealist paintings began to attract considerable critical attention, but were then condemned as degenerate by the Nazi government. Beginning in 1936 the Nazis forbade him to continue to paint or exhibit his work. In 1940 he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe as an operator of anti-aircraft artillery.The majority of his paintings were destroyed by a bomb raid on Munich in 1944, making his surviving pre-war work extremely rare. In 1951, Ende met the recognized founder of Surrealism, André Breton, who admired his work and declared him an official Surrealist. He continued to paint surrealist works until his death in 1965 of a myocardial infarction.
Ende's paintings are thought to have had a significant influence on his son's writing. This is inferred in the scenes depicting the surreal dream-paintings from Yor's Minroud in Die Unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story), and is made explicit in Michael Ende's book Der Spiegel im Spiegel (The mirror in the mirror), a collection of short stories based on (and printed alongside) Edgar Ende's surrealist works.Wikipedia

 

Surrealism Sabin Balasa

Sabin Balașa (June 17, 1932 in Dobriceni, Olt – April 1, 2008, Bucharest) was a contemporary Romanian painter. His works are described by himself as belonging to cosmic Romanticism.
He completed his high school education at Frații Buzești High School in Craiova in 1950. Among Bălaşa's most notable works are several large-scale fresco paintings, such as those decorating the inside of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași.
In 1973 and 1976 the Bucharest Mayor's office ordered and paid him to paint the portraits of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. In the late 1980s, Bălașa was accused of promoting the cult of personality. Apart from the works contracted by the Bucharest City hall, no other proof has been produced. Bălașa's father and uncle were in fact imprisoned for more than 20 years for opposing the Communist regime
In June 2005, Bălașa sued the French paper Le Monde for defamation after said paper reproduced a propaganda painting by another painter, claiming it was one of his . Le Monde subsequently acknowledged the error .Wikipedia