Cross-overs between various levels of reality – dream, vision, utopia – fascinated many artists during the 1960s and ’70s. Their work reveals an uneasiness with the self-assured and universalist position of what we choose to call ‘the Essential’. Instead the artists of the Transcendental – many of whom belonged to the arte povera (‘poor art’) movement in Italy – created works open to interpretation and doubt and critique. These artists address issues that are relevant to humanity as a whole, but they often did so through individual, subjective, even idiosyncratic gestures. Their ideological identification was anti-authoritarian and deliberately open-ended.

Some of the works in this ensemble are shown in Antwerp, while others are exhibited in Eindhoven.