Wolfgang Paalen

Wolfgang Paalen catalyzed critical art and intellectual theory, invented new automatist painting techniques, and inspired some of the most important artists of the 20th century.

Born in Vienna in 1905, Paalen was exposed to the elite members of art and academic society of the age including Hans Hofmann, Julius Meier-Graefe, Hans Arp, Fernand Léger, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. As an adult, his pioneering art innovations and theories were shared with and informed by the top thinkers including André Breton, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko.

After exhibiting with the Abstraction-Création group in the mid-1930s, Paalen joined the Surrealists and developed the technique of fumage, which involved the use of candle smoke in his painting compositions. Fleeing war-torn Europe for Mexico in 1939 with Alice Rahon, at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Paalen made Mexico his home. Paalen and his later wife, Luchita Hurtado del Solar, moved to Mill Valley, California in 1948, where Paalen formed the Dynaton Group with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican. Hurtado eventually divorced Paalen and married Mullican in 1950. Paalen returned to Mexico and remained there until his death in 1959.

An avid collector and theorist, Paalen's art was in an ever-constant state of change to reflect his environmental surroundings. He amassed an important collection of ethnological artifacts, many of which now belong to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Wolfgang Paalen's paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures have been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad and are represented in many museum collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Britain, London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Paalen founded the influential art magazine Dyn, which included writing and works from some of the most important artists of this era, as well as anthropologists and archaeologists. The Dyn group looked to pre-Columbian cultures, ethnography, archeology, and social and physical sciences, as well as imagery drawn from physics, mathematics, geology, and archaeology, inventing a new abstraction with the hope to reunite our prehistoric past as well as prefigure what might be. It was the subject of a dedicated exhibition at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2012-2013.

Paalen's work was featured in the exhibitions Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2022) and Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (2022); Surrealism Beyond Borders, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021) and Tate Modern, London (2022); Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism from 1910-1950, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2016-2017); and I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia, at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016). In 2019-2020, the Belvedere Museum in Vienna presented a solo exhibition of the artist,Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959): An Austrian Surrealist in Paris and Mexico.