Wolfgang Paalen, Les Cosmogones, 1944, oil on canvas, 96 x 93".
Wolfgang Paalen
Gallery Wendi Norris
We have, of late, witnessed a surge in scholarship on the Surrealist artists who gathered in Mexico City during World War II, and several recent exhibitions in California have interested a larger public in this group’s multitudinous activities. In 2012, after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,” the Getty Research Institute’s exhibition “Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico” concentrated on a small group of émigrés who broke with André Breton to establish a “post-Surrealist” practice that combined elements of abstraction, physics, the extraterrestrial, and the artworks of native American peoples. Foremost among this group was the Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen, who was born in Vienna in 1905 and died by his own hand in Taxco, Mexico, in 1959. This past winter, Gallery
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