Fleurs-coquillages

As one of the leading figures of surrealist painting in the 20th century, Max Ernst invented the scraping technique grattage to create his iconic paintings. He would apply multiple layers of paint in different shades on the canvas and then scrape them off to create an image that occupied somewhere between figuration and abstraction. Fleurs-coquillages is a remarkable and mature example of Ernst’s artistic experimentation during a very intense period in his career. The painting is also one of the first works to utilize grattage, resulting in a highly contingent image that generates more images with multiple referents. The shapes formed by the different layers of pigments drift back and forth between flowers and shells, opening up infinite possibilities for interpretation.