Asked by a reporter if she belonged to any particular school of painting, Alice Rahon replied, “I think I am a cave painter.” Like her artwork, Rahon’s response is profoundly textured, deceptively self-effacing, and devastatingly honest. Rahon was a “cave painter” in the most fundamental sense: Her creations express talismanic and ritualistic powers that transcend her time and influences. Her paintings act upon the viewer; they are experienced rather than merely seen.
Starting as a poet and emerging as a painter in the late 1930s from within the Parisian group led by Andre Breton, Rahon realized the Surrealist ideal of achieving union between the visual and the poetic image. This under-appreciated and overlooked artist had through her own work and in her numerous collaborative projects a strong influence on her contemporaries (Breton, Remedios Varo, Joan Miró, Leonora Carrington, Anaïs Nin, Wolfgang Paalen) and a lasting effect on Mexican modernism that can be seen in the work of Lilia Carrillo, Manuel Felguérez, José Luis Cuevas, and many others.
Building upon the new scholarship published by Gallery Wendi Norris in the first monograph on Alice Rahon (April 2021), this presentation at Frieze Masters features seven quintessential paintings and a sculpture dated between 1945-1975. Each of these pieces displays the remarkable movement between surface and depth, material and meaning, that is a hallmark of Rahon’s achievement as an artist. These are works that vibrate with a thickness both literal and metaphoric. They unveil the immanent.
