2025, Oil on canvas, 70 x 70cm
The original painting is sold, private collection.
Limited edition prints & artist proofs are available - Enquire.
Surrender (2025) is an original oil painting by Australian contemporary surrealist artist Joel Rea, measuring 70 × 70 cm.
The painting depicts two figures adrift in a small boat, overwhelmed by an immense breaking wave, while beneath the surface two female figures move through a vast underwater landscape.
The ocean has long been a recurring force in Rea's work, representing something simultaneously beautiful and threatening. This tension was explored by writer Tim Baker in a 2021 feature on Rea's work for The Surfer's Journal, Tiger Style, which considers the struggle and the sublime within his paintings. Baker describes Rea's waves as both destructive and alluring, an idea that finds a particularly quiet expression in Surrender. Faced with something vastly more powerful than ourselves, sometimes there is nothing left to do but let go.
Read the full feature: Tiger Style, The Surfer's Journal.