The Competitive Lover

Born and trained in Minnesota, Gerome Kamrowski moved to New York City in 1938 and soon joined a group of American artists there who were strongly influenced by many of Surrealism's basic goals. Like their European counterparts, these young Americans explored the depths of the unconscious to help free their creative imaginations. To Kamrowski, Surrealism represented the integration of the real world and the functional. This 1945 painting is part of a series Kamrowski produced featuring a world of poetic forms that evoke both microscopic views of cells, nerves, and fantastic biomorphic creatures, as well as cosmic space. Unlike those artists who only present us with the external structure of things, Kamrowski, as the Surrealist poet André Breton once said, allows us to be present at their formation.