When René Magritte painted La Condition Humaine—a canvas on an easel perfectly blending into the landscape behind it—he wasn’t just painting a picture. He was staging a coup against our perception of reality. He forced us to ask: What is the real world, and what is merely a representation?
Today, as we stand on the brink of the next ArtPrize, we face a brand new canvas: the digital realm.
But while early critics dismissed digital spaces as "fake" or "virtual illusions," contemporary philosophy offers a radical new lens.German philosopher Markus Gabriel famously argues for a concept called New Realism. His core idea? Everything that exists is real within its own context (or "field of sense"). A physical rock is real in the physical world. But a virtual object inside a VR headset? That is equally real within its digital context. The experience of that virtual space is 100% genuine.
This brings us to The New Surrealism.We want to encourage artists for this year’s ArtPrize to stop viewing Virtual Reality as an escape from the world, and start viewing it as an extension of it. A VR headset is not a mask to hide behind; it is the modern equivalent of Magritte’s window—a tool to uncover an equally real, yet previously invisible, layer of our existence.True art has always tilted our perspective. It disrupts the mundane and forces us to look closer.
By merging Magritte’s surrealist defiance with Gabriel’s new realism, we challenge you to create art that blurs the boundaries of sensory perception.Physical or virtual, digital or material—it doesn't matter. It is all part of the fabric of our reality. The question is: How will you use this new canvas to change the way we see the world?