“First things first, I’m surrealist,” wrote Katy Perry on one of her Instagrams from her visit last night to the Art Institute of Chicago’s René Magritte show “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938.”
The pop star and provocateur sung high praise for the exhibition, which traveled from MoMA. On an Instagram of the Belgian Surrealist’s 1928 painting The False Mirror, Perry urged her fans to see the show, saying, “It will blow your conventional mind & wake you up from your zombie state!” Naturally, such a proclamation was accompanied by the palette emoji.
Intrigued by Perry’s recent statements about wanting to collect art and learn art history, Rebecca Baldwin, the Director of Public Affairs at the Art Institute, invited Perry to see the show in the hopes of bringing Perry’s fans, nicknamed the Katycats, to the museum. “When we saw that she was going to be in Chicago, we offered her an after-hours tour,” Baldwin told ARTnews.
(Perry might still have a thing or two to learn about Surrealist art, though. On an Instagram of The Treachery of Images—Magritte’s sparely painted image of a pipe, which, according to the French cursive text under it, isn’t a pipe—Perry wrote, “Um… YES IT IS.” Her fans, it seems, might not completely understand Magritte either. “I HATE THE ILLUMINATI,” wrote one user in response to Perry’s False Mirror Instagram.)
After going through the exhibition, Perry took a look at the museum’s permanent collection and stopped by Grant Wood’s American Gothic for a selfie.