René François Ghislain Magritte (Lessines, Belgium; November 21, 1898 - Brussels, Belgium; August 15, 1967), was a Belgian surrealist painter. Known for his ingenious and provocative images, he intended with his work to change the pre-conditioned perception of reality and force the viewer to become hypersensitive to their surroundings.

Magritte gave surrealism a conceptual charge based on the play of ambiguous images and their meaning denoted through words, questioning the relationship between a painted object and a real one.

Little is known about Magritte's early years. He was born in Lessines, province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest of the children of Léopold Magritte, a tailor and cloth merchant, and Regina (née Bertinchamps). He began drawing lessons in 1910. On March 12, 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning in the Sambre River . This was not her first attempt, as she had been trying to take her own life for years, forcing her husband Léopold to lock her in their bedroom. One day she escaped and was lost for days. She was later discovered dead downstream. According to legend, Magritte, then 13 years old, was present when the body was recovered from the water, but recent research has discredited that story. The image of his mother floating, with her dress covering her face, may have influenced a series of paintings from 1927 to 1928, including one of his best-known works, Les Amants, but Magritte himself rejected such an interpretation of the painting.

He took his first painting courses in Châtelet. In 1915 he began to make his first works in the line of Impressionism. Between 1916 and 1918, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. He exhibited for the first time at the Brussels Art Center in 1920, together with Pierre-Louis Flouquet, with whom he shared a studio. After military service he works temporarily as a designer in a paper factory. In 1923 he participated with Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger and Paul Joostens in an exhibition at the Royal Artistic Circle.

Although he maintained a certain relationship with Breton and the surrealists, there were sometimes rifts between them. Magritte was always very independent, maintaining his ideas and artistic principles above fashions or group interests. represented by a loose and frequently foreshortened brushstroke.

In his paintings it is very common to see games of duplications, absences and representations within representations; Furthermore, Magritte manipulated everyday images as a game with which to explore the limits of perception. More than the theoretical disquisitions and automatism of the surrealists of the Paris group, Magritte was interested in irony, the subversion of the optical values of traditional painting and word games. His paintings generally lack the complexity, drama or convulsive appearance of other surrealist works, and often feature winks or references to traditional painting. Common to the other surrealists , however, are the dreamlike appearance of their paintings, the taste for the "double image" or the fragmented image, and iconoclastic irony.

One of the obsessions or recurring motifs in his painting is the encounter of opposites, of contrasting realities that come together, resulting in paradoxical and strange. Thus, night landscapes illuminated by clear skies with clouds (The Empire of Lights series), boots that have the appearance of bare feet, heavy rocks or metal balls floating weightlessly in the air.