Aquis Submersus

A stiff, doll-like figure stands beside a still pool overlooked by a tower with a clock-like face, the scene rendered with cool, dreamlike precision and an air of frozen unease. Max Ernst, just turning from Dada toward Surrealism, builds this early enigma under the spell of de Chirico's empty, foreboding spaces. Now in the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt, Aquis Submersus shows him assembling the vocabulary of dream and the uncanny that would define his mature work - mannequins, strange architecture, and a heavy, hypnotic silence, the ordinary made quietly disturbing.