THE PROLIFIC EGYPTIAN SURREALIST COLLECTIVE Art and Liberty has been directly inserted into the center of its European counterpart this winter. In Paris, the Pompidou’s “Art and Liberty: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948)” demonstrates the vibrant contemporary interest in Egyptian modernism, paralleling a similarly themed exhibition this past fall at the Palace of Arts in Cairo. Framed in the city of Breton et al., the work drove home the relationship between anticolonialism and antifascism, East and West. (Indeed, the group’s manifesto, with which the show opens, makes a pointed

In the work of Sabine Moritz—who emigrated from the German Democratic Republic to West Germany as an adolescent in 1985, and who has since developed a practice consistently focused on drawing and painting—themes of history and memory feature prominently. This concern with temporality is suggested not only by motifs from the past (both historical and personal) and ones that insinuate the passage of time, but also by their recurrence across her oeuvre. In this exhibition of new paintings and drawings, altered versions of buildings, boats, flowers, and skulls reappeared, interspersed with

For this show of work by Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, who exhibit as Rometti Costales, the gallery’s window was a surface of both transparency and obstruction. On one side was mounted a 35-mm slide, turned red from long exposure to daylight, showing a statue of an Aztec god with plants tattooed on his arms and legs (Xochipilli in Magenta, 2014). The slide was made from a reproduction in the catalogue of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia de México. Like those threatening sculptures that flank the entrances to Asian temples, the image of the statue protected the exhibition from the outside.