Hollis Taggart is pleased to present a focused exhibition of the artist Dusti Bongé’s surrealist works. A deeply intuitive painter long represented by the Betty Parsons Gallery as well as Mississippi’s most acclaimed modernist artist of the post-war era, Bongé (1903-1993) fused the influences of the New York School with colors and forms inspired by the overlooked “third” coast of the U.S.—the Gulf Coast. Featuring fifteen paintings from the late 1930s to early 1950s, this exhibition spotlights how Bongé’s surrealist works served as a crucial bridge between her early figuration to her later, more well-known, abstract style. ‘Dusti Bongé: Portals and Passages, Surrealist Works from the 1940s to 1950s’ will be on view on the first floor Annex of Hollis Taggart from January 9 through February 22, 2025, with an opening reception on Thursday, January 9, from 5-8PM. Rather than the automatist techniques of Bretonian surrealism that privileged unconscious mark making, Bongé was more interested in the surrealist imagery of dreams. The artist often dreamt canvases so vivid and complete that she immediately woke to paint them in the middle of the night. “In one show with the Betty Parsons Gallery,” Bongé later recalled, “I had at least five ‘dream’ pictures. At any time I kept small canvases on my easel, which was close to the bed. If I happened to dream a painting I would then be able to get up quickly and paint it, before it was lost.” Like many other New York artists during the 1940s, the theories of Freud and Jung additionally informed Bongé’s thinking about the role of dreams in creative practices.