BEYOND REALITY

BEYOND REALITY brings together work by GRCA students exploring ideas associated with Surrealism. Across sculpture, painting, drawing, and collage, the exhibition looks at how familiar objects and images can be transformed to create something unexpected. Surrealism emerged in Europe in the early twentieth century. Its artists drew on dreams, imagination, the unconscious, and chance.

They often departed from ordinary ways of seeing and representing the world. Objects were taken out of their usual context, proportions were altered, and unrelated things were brought together to create strange or impossible situations. The students in BEYOND REALITY have explored these ideas through a range of projects. An ice cream cone becomes the starting point for an unfamiliar object.

Landscapes are reimagined through changes in scale, perspective, and space. Photographs and printed images are cut, combined, and rearranged to create scenes that could not exist in reality. The exhibition also includes selected works from the GRCA Youth Art Competition, inspired by Ren Magrittes The False Mirror (1928). The competition asked students to imagine what might exist within the eye, using Magrittes painting as a starting point for their own interpretations.

Together, the works in BEYOND REALITY show how Surrealist ideas can be explored by students of different ages and through different forms of art-making. The exhibition reflects their willingness to look at ordinary things differently and to imagine possibilities beyond what is immediately visible.

The Garden Route Centre for the Arts (GRCA) is a multidisciplinary arts education institution in Plettenberg Bay dedicated to cultivating the creative and intellectual development of young people from Grade R through Grade 12. Through a diverse programme of artistic disciplines, exhibitions, projects and community engagement, GRCA introduces students to the practice, history and possibilities of the arts.

Its programmes encourage curiosity, critical thinking, experimentation and self-expression, while providing a foundation for lifelong engagement with culture and creativity. Serving the Garden Route community, GRCA is committed to establishing a lasting cultural institution where young people can encounter, study and contribute to the arts.