This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte examines the artist’s legacy through significant paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and photography from all periods of his career. Loaned by museums and private collectors, they include his best-known subjects, from apples and pipes to bowler hats and cotton-cloud skies. These are juxtaposed with works by contemporary artists of different generations, many of which have been created specifically for the exhibition.

With this presentation, Gagosian marks the anniversaries of two historical Magritte exhibitions. It is twenty years since Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images (2006–07) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), a group exhibition distinguished by dramaturgical installations conceived by John Baldessari, which was the first major exploration of the Belgian Surrealist’s impact on American and European artists of the postwar generation. Gagosian’s London exhibition also acknowledges the landmark International Surrealist Exhibition held ninety years ago at the New Burlington Galleries, London, a short walk from the Grosvenor Hill gallery. The 1936 exhibition is regarded as a watershed for the Surrealist movement and was instrumental in establishing Magritte’s own international reputation.

This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte includes the painting La Lampe philosophique (The Philosopher’s Lamp, 1936), which featured in LACMA’s exhibition. The painting was made shortly before the International Surrealist Exhibition, which featured a gouache of the same image. Widely understood as a conceptual self-portrait, La Lampe philosophique epitomizes Magritte’s pictorial explorations of paradox and introspection. The artist wrote about this work: “The meditations of an absent-minded, obsessive philosopher may conjure up the image of a mental world closed in upon itself as, in this case, the smoker is the prisoner of his pipe.”