ARTIST

Marcel Mariën (Born 1920 in Antwerp, died 1993 in Brussels)

Mariën is one of the most intriguing figures in the Belgian wing of the Surrealist movement. He opened a bookshop, “Au Miroir d’Elizabeth”, worked as a sailor, then as a journalist in China and carried out elaborate Surrealist jokes.

Mariën worked in several mediums, photography, collage, drawing, painting, object making, poetry and film. He was also the chronicler of the activities of the Belgian Surrealists and wrote the first monograph on René Magritte, published in 1943.
The same year he produced his first remarkable photograph, “De Sade à Lénine”. An image of a woman cutting a slice of bread, the loaf gripped tightly against her naked torso, the blade pointing at her left breast. Soon after he abandoned photography to express himself in other media.

Mariën was helped by his partner Hedwige Benedix in the production of his artwork. In 1983, a year after her death, he took up photography again, as an immediate way of expressing his ideas. He carried on where he had left off in 1943 and began producing one extraordinary image after another, simple yet elegant Surreal images, with free associations of symbolism and text.