Still Not a Pipe: Why Magritte Refuses to Stay in the Past

Nearly a century ago, René Magritte painted a pipe and wrote beneath it, in careful schoolroom lettering, that it was not a pipe. The joke still lands, and it still unsettles. From today, a free exhibition in Mayfair asks why a Belgian painter who died in 1967 continues to feel like one of the most contemporary artists around.

This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte opens at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery on 24 September and runs until 12 December. Organised with the Fondation Magritte and curated by Jasper Sharp and Bernard Lagrange, it brings together around 70 works, pairing more than 20 paintings, works on paper and sculptures by Magritte with pieces by upwards of forty artists from several generations, many made specifically for the show.

A homecoming of sorts

The location matters. In the summer of 1936, the International Surrealist Exhibition opened at the New Burlington Galleries, a short walk from where Gagosian now stands. It was a noisy, headline-grabbing affair (Salvador Dalí lectured in a diving suit and nearly suffocated), and it helped fix Surrealism, and Magritte’s name, in the British imagination.

One of the stars of the new show links directly to that moment. La Lampe philosophique (The Philosopher’s Lamp), painted in 1936, shows Magritte himself by candlelight, his nose grotesquely extended and curling down into the bowl of his own pipe. A gouache version of the image appeared in the 1936 exhibition. It is funny, a little disturbing and oddly melancholy, a portrait of a thinker so absorbed in his own habits that he has become trapped by them. That blend of wit and unease is Magritte in miniature.

The motifs everyone knows

If you have never stood in front of a Magritte, you have almost certainly seen one secondhand. The bowler-hatted men, the green apples hovering in front of faces, the blue skies stuffed with cotton-wool clouds, the pipes: these images have been borrowed so often by advertisers, album designers, fashion houses and filmmakers that they now feel like part of the furniture of visual culture. Magritte himself worked in commercial art for years, designing posters and wallpaper, and he understood better than most how an image could slip its moorings and travel.

That is partly what this exhibition is about. It is less interested in tracing obvious visual echoes than in following a way of thinking. The curators have said they want to avoid simply hanging a contemporary apple next to a Magritte apple. Instead, the aim is to draw conceptual lines between his work and artists who might never describe themselves as Surrealists at all, ranging from figures in their eighties and nineties to painters barely out of art school.

Why now?

There is an unmistakable figurative, dreamlike turn in painting at the moment. Walk around any graduate show or independent gallery and you will find uncanny interiors, strangely lit objects and bodies arranged in impossible ways. Lagrange has pointed to the “darker, stranger underbelly” of Magritte’s world as the part that speaks most strongly to younger artists. Sharp has gone further, suggesting the most contemporary artist in the room may turn out to be Magritte himself.

Magritte’s paintings are about the gap between an image and the thing it shows, which makes him a natural guide for an era of filters, deepfakes and AI-generated pictures. The Treachery of Images, the 1929 pipe painting, is often taught as a philosophy lesson in paint: a representation is never the thing itself. In 2026 that feels less like a clever paradox and more like a practical warning.

The market in the background

It would be naive to ignore the commercial context. Gagosian is a commercial gallery, and some of the Magrittes on show will be for sale. His market has climbed steeply in recent years. In 2024, L’Empire des lumières sold at Christie’s New York for around $121 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a Surrealist work, and this summer a 1965 gouache, La Belle Promenade, fetched £16 million at Sotheby’s London. For a show running through Frieze Week, those figures are part of the story.

None of that should put off the casual visitor. Admission is free, the loans include works rarely seen in public, and the chance to see so much Magritte in one London space does not come round often.

How to look

If you go, resist the urge to “solve” each picture. Magritte disliked having his images read as symbols with hidden meanings. He wanted them to provoke a kind of pleasurable disorientation, a moment where the familiar suddenly looks strange. Spend time with the ordinary objects: the apple, the hat, the window. Then notice what happens when you walk back out onto a Mayfair street and look at the shop signs, the adverts and the reflections in the glass. That lingering sense that the world is a little less solid than it seemed is Magritte’s real afterlife.

This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte is at Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London W1, from 24 September to 12 December 2026. Admission is free.