NARRATOR: Max Ernst painted Gramineous Bicycle in 1921. As Leah Dickerman notes, it is painted on an inverted botanical chart, and plays on the botanical term, ‘graminaceous.’
CURATOR, LEAH DICKERMAN: The word ‘graminaceous’ refers to grasses or plants, so perhaps these were plant cells, and photographs of microscopic images were newly available in the printed media. This is a newly accessible world, and its foreignness seemed to be really appealing to Ernst. He took this print and reinforced it with gouache and blacked-out sections selectively, combining the organic cells with mechanic parts and creating this very fantastic biotechnological world.
NARRATOR: To Anne Umland, Ernst’s technique of selective over-painting only heightens the work’s fanciful illusionism and mystery.
CURATOR, ANNE UMLAND: There is this whole conflation in this picture of rational languages, cellular diagrams, dotted diagonal lines, things that would in other contexts make sense of some sort. Here, attached to strange wheel-like gears, these vaguely sexual organic yet mechanized forms are set against this mysterious shrouded deep, dark ground, like some dream from the subconscious.
So the whole idea of taking something that is intended to communicate clearly rational information is literally upended and recreated into something hauntingly strange.