Independent 20th Century 2026: Marie Wilson

VIP Preview Day

Thursday, September 24, 10 am – 8 pm

Public Days

Friday, September 25, 11 am – 7 pm

Saturday, September 26, 11 am – 7 pm

Sunday, September 27, 11 am – 6 pm

Gallery Wendi Norris is proud to present a selection of paintings and works on paper by the American Surrealist artist Marie Wilson at Independent 20th Century. This marks Wilson’s debut exhibition in New York, as well as the first time many of these works will be on view in the United States.

Marie Wilson (1922, Cedarville, CA – 2017, Athens, Greece) produced a revelatory and singular body of work. Her practice was rooted equally in the cultural and spiritual milieu of Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Area of her youth, and in the intellectual currents of European Surrealism, which she experienced while living and working among the movement’s central figures in the 1950s. Over the course of six decades, she created oil paintings, drawings in ink and pencil, lithographs, and ceramics of biomorphic and geometric forms, ranging from semi-abstract arrangements to the exactingly symmetrical compositions of her later period. 

Reviewing Wilson’s debut at Gallery Wendi Norris in January 2026, Artforum praised her oeuvre as “a mash-up of delicious morsels, a grab bag of Surrealist and visionary art: a little of Wifredo Lam’s curves, dots, and dashes; overlapping waves of glowing colors that brought to mind Agnes Pelton; the gestural cartoons of Joan Miró; and grids and geometries suggestive of Hilma af Klint.” 

Wilson’s early paintings, dated 1952-54, reflect the avant-garde styles she encountered in the Bay Area’s vibrant postwar art scene, which was largely influenced by European Surrealists, including the Austrian artist and theorist Wolfgang Paalen. In 1952, she followed Paalen to Paris, where he introduced her to the Surrealist movement’s co-founder, André Breton. 

In France, she produced such paintings as Milkyway Totem (1952-54), a lightly colored, yet delicately charged work that presaged the visionary paintings of her later period, when her style would become entirely symmetrical. Rendered in textured oil and sand on board, the painting's three totemic structures are built up in raised lines, their forms delineated with small inset passages of color set against a pale, weathered ground. The radiating spokes crowning the central totem suggest the celestial reach implied by the work's title, while its stepped, temple-like base and flanking forms hint at the ceremonial architecture that recurs throughout Wilson's work.

By 1954, Wilson began to develop meticulous, symmetrical compositions of striking complexity, clarity, and precision. Where Wilson's early paintings frequently depicted totems charged with cosmic energy, her later symmetrical works would go further still: becoming totems in their own right. 

The Ascent (1960) exemplifies this development. Painted in oil on masonite, the work is organized along a single vertical axis of mirror symmetry, its dense imagery unfolding in stacked registers from a wide, golden base to a radiant disc at the top, as if the composition itself enacts its own rising movement. Zoomorphic forms merge with gesturing, upraised arms, rendered in a hot, saturated palette of gold, coral, and cobalt. Aligned across the lower half, fields of small yellow dots carry a kind of particle energy—a possible trace of Wilson's engagement with the science-inspired aesthetic of the Paalen-led Dynaton movement.

About Marie Wilson

Marie Wilson (1922, Cedarville, CA – 2017, Athens, Greece) emerged from her Northern California upbringing with a conviction that she had “been born an artist.” After studying art at Mills College, Oakland, and the University of California, Berkeley, she entered the Bay Area’s vibrant postwar avant-garde, guided by the Greek artist Jean Varda and British surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford, and was drawn into the intellectual circle of the influential Dynaton movement.

Her move to Paris in 1952 with Austrian surrealist and theorist Wolfgang Paalen marked a turning point. She worked with the leading figures of European surrealism, notably André Breton, the co-founder of the movement, who exhibited her work alongside other surrealists’ and included her in avant-garde journals and reviews. During this period she deepened her engagement with automatism, occultism, and global spiritual traditions. Early works from this period fused lyrical abstraction with biomorphic, mosaic-like forms, reflecting a synthesis of surrealist experimentation and her longstanding interest in Indigenous American, pre-Columbian, and other non-Western iconographies.

By the mid-1950s, Wilson began to forge uniquely symmetrical, meticulously rendered, spiritually charged compositions that she approached with intense concentration and an almost ritualistic method. Inspired by "outsider" visionaries such as Fleury Joseph Crépin and Augustin Lesage, she developed a deliberate form of automatism. Her work from this period and beyond, including collaborations with her husband, the poet Nanos Valaoritis, reveals a visual language that echoes Navajo snd paintings, Tibetan mandalas, and Pacific Northwest art—a confluence of the cosmic and the totemic. She once described her process as such:

“When I look at an empty canvas, I go to the center automatically. Usually, I start a little above center, and draw a dot or maybe a little shadow there—something. Then I put another bit to the right and to the left, and then above and then below. It’s like a cross. I work like that, as if I were making lace. I invent it as I go. I am not starting with an idea. I don’t know where or what I am going to do when I begin a drawing or a painting.”