Undercover Surrealism draws its inspiration and much of its material from DOCUMENTS, the groundbreaking surrealist magazine edited by French thinker Georges Bataille.

It re-invests some of the best-known modern masterpieces by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti with the explosive vitality of the cultural and intellectual climate of Paris in the late 1920s.

Reflecting the visual richness and violent confrontations in DOCUMENTS between art, popular culture, ethnography, film and archaeology, Undercover Surrealism unbalances conventional categories, and enables new modes of looking at and thinking about major works of art.

Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the Hayward Gallery, 11 May – 30 July 2006.

Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS, published by Hayward Gallery Publishing, has won the best exhibition catalogue published during the last year in Great Britain and Ireland in the fifth Art Newspaper and AXA Art Insurance Award.