René Magritte - Salvador Dalí. Surrealism in Two Acts

Two names everyone knows, and two very different kinds of print: late lithographs by the Belgian René Magritte beside the cycle in which Salvador Dalí summed up half a century of Surrealism. The Regional Museum in Krasnystaw shows them from 2 to 28 October 2026 in its own building at ul. Piłsudskiego 5A. The museum publishes no English text; the words below are our translation of its Polish description.

Regional Museum in Krasnystaw on the exhibition:

René Magritte

The exhibition shows a selection of late lithographs from 1967 - the last year of the artist’s life. In them Magritte returns to the motifs typical of his work and to his play with what we see. Familiar pieces of reality appear in unexpected combinations - a landscape can turn into a bird, and a body can merge with the sky. These are images that look simple at first glance but soon begin to raise questions.

Salvador Dalí

The second part of the exhibition is made up of seven prints from the cycle “After 50 Years of Surrealism”, created in 1973-1974, almost fifty years after the first Surrealist manifesto was proclaimed. In them Dalí returns to people, events and themes that mattered in his work. Among others, Gala, Picasso and Freud appear, as do religion, America and the museum the artist created in Figueres. It is a very personal view of Surrealism - and of himself.

What to expect

This is an exhibition of prints, not paintings. Both parts are impressions on paper, and prints are by nature pulled in many copies, so these are not one-offs like the canvases familiar from art books. The Dalí part has seven works. The museum does not say how many Magritte lithographs hang beside them, or in which room.

The cycle “After 50 Years of Surrealism” was published in 1974 by Transworld Art of Fribourg, Switzerland. According to the auction house Phillips, the complete portfolio has twelve hand-coloured etchings with a text by André Parinaud, and the English edition ran to 195 copies. In Krasnystaw you therefore see a selection, not the whole portfolio.

The exhibition poster shows the difference between the two parts well. Dalí has a thin, restless line and a few patches of colour on a white ground. Magritte has flat, clean colour: a sky with clouds, a green apple in a window, a man in a bowler hat seen from behind. The museum gives neither titles nor edition sizes for the lithographs.

The poster carries the logo of Epicentrum Art Gallery. According to the gallery’s profile on the Hamptons Fine Art Fair website, it specialises in prints by masters of 20th-century European art, Dalí among them. The museum does not say, however, whether the works come from that gallery.

Allow 20-30 minutes for the exhibition itself. If you add the permanent displays in the twenty-three rooms of the former Jesuit college, allow an hour and a half. That is the editors’ estimate, not the museum’s figure. A summer show of lithographs after Matisse’s cut-outs at the Museum of the Chełm Land, closed on 6 September 2026, used a similar format. Krasnystaw, by contrast, sets two artists and two techniques side by side.

Context

Surrealism grew out of the first manifesto, which André Breton proclaimed in 1924. The movement looked for images in dreams and the unconscious, and its members read Freud. It put imagination and surprise above logic.

René Magritte (1898-1967) was Belgian and lived in Brussels from 1930. He is famous for everyday objects in unexpected combinations. His best-known painting, “The Treachery of Images” of 1929, shows a pipe with a caption saying that this is not a pipe. He died in Brussels on 15 August 1967.

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) came from Figueres in Catalonia. He joined the Surrealists in 1929, and in 1939 Breton expelled him from the group. Gala, who appears in the cycle, was his wife from 1934. The Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, set in the ruins of a theatre burned during the Spanish Civil War, opened on 28 September 1974, the year the portfolio was published; the artist lies in its crypt.

Tickets and time

An ordinary museum ticket. The museum publishes no separate price for this exhibition. The museum’s price list gives 14 PLN for a full ticket, 8 PLN reduced and 30 PLN for a family ticket (up to two adults and five children under 18). Children under 7 go free.

Free admission on Thursdays. The price list does not exclude temporary exhibitions from this rule. The last Thursday before the exhibition closes is 22 October.

Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 8:00-16:00 (8 AM to 4 PM), Saturday and Sunday 10:00-15:00, closed on Mondays and public holidays. The museum’s website announces no autumn change of hours, and no public holiday falls in October, so this schedule holds until the exhibition closes.

The last day is Wednesday 28 October 2026. The exhibition’s last weekend falls on 24-25 October, open 10:00-15:00.

Access: the museum does not say which floor the exhibition is on. Its accessibility statement says that only the corridor and the rooms on the ground floor are accessible to wheelchair users, and that there is no lift. The toilet is in the basement and is not adapted. Telephone before you travel: +48 82 576 36 63.

Getting there: Krasnystaw lies on national road 17 between Lublin and Zamość, 55 km from Lublin. From Krasnystaw Miasto railway station the museum is about a quarter of an hour on foot.

Language: the English version of the museum’s website repeats the Polish text, and the museum says nothing about captions in other languages. Expect labels in Polish only.

Who it is for: worth it if you live in the region and want to see prints by Magritte and Dalí without a trip to Warsaw or abroad. Good for a family outing: a family ticket costs less than three full ones, and the display is short. Skip it if you are hoping for famous oil paintings: these are prints on paper.

See also

• Stanisław Fijałkowski. Drawings from Kazimierz at the Vistula Museum - drawings by the Łódź painter and the prints he developed from them, until 30 November 2026. Good if what caught your interest was the road from drawing to print.
• Where the Line Becomes a Story… Witold Chomicz 1910-1984 in Kozłówka - prints, paintings and designs for stained glass and stamps by one artist, until 29 November 2026. Another autumn exhibition of prints in the Lublin region.
• Rays of the South. Lights of the Borderlands at the Museum of the Chełm Land - paintings and drawings by Mariusz Woszczyński, until 20 November 2026. Chełm is 27 km from Krasnystaw, so both exhibitions fit into one day.

Museum profile: Regional Museum in Krasnystaw .