Issac Cordal, Now TV and Big Idea #198 is Surrealism

Part of  “Follow the Leaders”

I don't know if you've heard of Issac Cordal he's a sculpture artist from Galicia, Spain (now based in London I think). His sculptures are of little people sculpted from concrete in ‘real’ situations. Cordal  manages to capture a lot of emotion in his work.
I learnt of him from a facebook posting, seems that in Nantes, the city once known as the European capital of the human slave trade  his latest work is showing it's called “Follow the Leaders” and is “a reflection on our inertia as a social mass,”
Sadly it ends this week, not sure where it goes next?

Now TV box ordered

Now TV box at £10 box proved irresistible, have ordered will update the blog on what it does when I get it .

Big Idea 198 (I think?) is Surrealism

As I thunder towards the end of Crofton's Big Ideas in Brief I find something has gone wrong either there aren't 200 or I've missed one out (a prize if you can find the missing idea!), anyway today we're on Surrealism.

Surrealist influences abound in the 'modern' world, reflect on advertising and it's connecting of disparate subjects or the LP covers of years gone by ('Wish you were here' for example perhaps).
In fact having reviewed the topic it's surprising to see such an influential movement being dominated by so few characters. Somewhat inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud on the subconscious it's  a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s. Principally known for its visual artworks and writings the aim of surrealism was according to The 20th-Century art book "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality."

After the Dada group Andre Breton went on to start and lead the Surrealist movement in 1924. In New York, Breton and his colleagues curated Surrealist exhibitions that introduced ideas of automatism and intuitive art making to the first Abstract Expressionists. Breton worked in various creative media, focusing on collage and printmaking as well as writing books. Breton  re-imagined ways in which words and images could be combined through chance  to create new word-image combinations..
Other figures strongly associated with Surrealism are the great self publicist Salvador Dali and the seemingly bourgeois Belgian Rene Magritte.
Here's an introduction..