In May 2025 Luxembourg + Co., New York, will open René Magritte: The Phantom Landscape, an exhibition that explores Magritte’s unconventional engagement with the genre of landscape painting in his work. The show will bring together a group of important paintings by the Belgian master, including loans from major institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and others.. In addition, the display will include a site-specific response to Magritte’s work by contemporary artist Laure Prouvost.
Typically associated with romantic or naturalist tendencies, the notion of landscape painting is rarely discussed within the scholarship of Magritte’s oeuvre despite the genre’s significance to his practice. This is largely due to the manner in which Magritte depicted landscape in his paintings – with technical “dryness of handling” for one, but also by conjunction (or substitution) of landscape motifs with textual elements.
To unfold the principles and underlying ideas behind Magritte’s engagement with the genre, the exhibition René Magritte: The Phantom Landscape explores three principal groups of paintings: The first, subtitled ‘Frames of Reference’, exploring cases in which Magritte depicts a picture of landscape inside another picture.
The second group, subtitled, 'The Sky is the Limit', includes depictions of sky and cloudsd in the artist's work. Finally, the third group, 'Human Landscapes' looks at compositions where the body becomes integrated into landscape.
A new printed publication will accompany the exhibition, with written contributions by three contemporary artists – Laure Prouvost, Allison Katz, and Linder Sterling – responding to the exhibition’s principal themes.