Golconda - Puzzle

70 cm x 50 cm
27.5" x 19.5"
1,000 pieces

In Belgian painter René Magritte’s sublime fashion of rendering commonplace images as extraordinary, he takes an ordinary suburban scene and transforms it into a statement, a mystery, a joke in his 1953 work, Golconda.

Nearly identical men clad in overcoats, bowler hats and apathetic expressions rain down (or float in mid-air like spectres) in precise grid-like formation against a neutral backdrop of buildings and sky. There is no indication of motion.

René Magritte (born November 21, 1898, Lessines, Belgium—died August 15, 1967, Brussels) was a Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery. His works were characterized by particular symbols—the female torso, the bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the apple, the castle, the rock, the window, and other ordinary objects, which were often set in unusual or unsettling situations.