The Hopkins Literary Festival is honoured to feature work ‘the last of the Surrealists’, Desmond Morris.

Better known from his ten years presenting Zootime on BBC TV, and even more so from the amazing success of his book ‘The Naked Ape’ (20 million copies sold worldwide), Morris is also a surrealist painter of note: his first exhibition was in 1948 and he still paints regularly.

Since he exhibited with Joan Miro in 1950, Morris has been gradually recognised worldwide as an artist of real quality, probably the foremost exponent of Surrealism in Britain and beyond.

Rebelling against Conventional Society, Favouring Pure Fantasy

The aim of Surrealism (whose ranks at various stages included Picasso and Dali, film director Luis Bunuel, and poet André Breton, founder of the movement in Paris in the 20’s) was to rebel against conventional society and its artistic assumptions.

Surrealists abandoned the control of reason favouring pure fantasy. This seemed to be the only worthwhile artistic impulse: a world of pure, unmoored, imagination, of swirling shapes and colours that defied rational explanation and even flew in the face of it.

Zoologist, Morris, has a 'biomorphic' Vision

We are delighted to show a wide selection of Desmond Morris's art, from the brush of arguably Surrealism's most distinguished surviving practitioner. Morris, a zoologist, describes the imagery in his work as ‘biomorphic’, stimulated by his work as a researcher in biology and suggestive of the images which he saw through through his microscope, a unique mixture of the irrational, the evocative and the artistically inventive.

Come and enjoy the Surrealist Art of Desmond Morris. You will not easily see - and enjoy - such an Exhibition again and The Hopkins Society is honoured that Desmond Morris has decided to exhibit as part of our 36th Annual Hopkins Festival.