Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon | Worlds Gone and to Come
Gallery Wendi Norris
436 Jackson Street, San Francisco
“Painting is the adventure into an inner space which cannot be measured by yardsticks nor light years. A space where thought travels faster than light, where the nearest is also the farthest, where the smallest sea-shell curves are as meaningful as the galactic spiral and the eye of the mind at once beholds worlds gone and to come.” — Wolfgang Paalen, Dynaton (1951)
Gallery Wendi Norris is proud to present rarely seen paintings and works on paper by Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon, marking the first time their oeuvre has been presented together in a two-person show.
Husband and wife from 1934 to 1947, Paalen and Rahon charted artistic paths that were simultaneously deeply rooted in Surrealism and charged by their own singular visions. Alice Rahon (1904, Chenecey-Buillon, France – 1987, Mexico City, Mexico) would come to embody the promise of Surrealism, transforming her background as a celebrated poet into a visual language that turned canvases into luminous, textured topographies of poetic incantation. Wolfgang Paalen (1905, Vienna, Austria – 1959, Taxco, Mexico)—hailed as the "philosopher of the possible"—in turn represented the movement’s theoretical evolution, an artist who made significant contributions to the Surrealist movement in the 1930s before co-founding the Dynaton movement in the late 1940s in the San Francisco Bay Area in an effort to move beyond Surrealism’s dogmas.
Through a selection of works ranging from Paalen’s innovative fumage technique—a mode of automatic image-making he described as “dictation by candle”—to Rahon’s sand-infused, sedimentary paintings, the exhibition underscores these artists’ enduring significance. These works demonstrate how Paalen and Rahon did not merely document their surroundings, but utilized their art as a form of artistic excavation, revealing and unearthing forms, color, and cosmic energies.
To celebrate the exhibition’s opening, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Gallery Wendi Norris will co-present a public conversation at 6 pm on September 10 at SFMOMA between Alexander Nemerov, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University, and Megan Kincaid, who serves on the Faculty of the Humanities & Social Sciences at The Cooper Union and is Curator of the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection. The talk marks the 75-year anniversary of SFMOMA's original staging of Paalen's landmark Dynaton exhibition in 1951, and the museum's role in presenting Rahon's first solo exhibition in 1945. More information and tickets can be found at this link.
About the artists
Wolfgang Paalen (1905, Vienna, Austria – 1959, Taxco, Mexico) was exposed from a young age to leading figures of European art and intellectual life, including Hans Hofmann, Julius Meier-Graefe, Hans Arp, Fernand Léger, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. After exhibiting with the Abstraction-Création group in the mid-1930s, he joined the Surrealist movement and developed fumage, a mode of image-making he described as “dictation by candle,” in which he held a candle flame to the painted canvas and marked the surface with hazy, nebulous forms rendered in soot.
He married Alice Rahon in 1934, and in 1939, they fled Europe for British Columbia, making their way south from Alaska and, at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, down the Pacific coast to Mexico City, where they would ultimately settle. Paalen founded the influential magazine Dyn in 1942, which included writing and works from some of the most important artists of this era. Paalen and his circle 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 come to be.
He and Rahon divorced in 1947, and in 1948 he moved to Mill Valley, CA, with Luchita Hurtado, whom he would later marry, and where he formed the Dynaton group with the artists Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican. He later returned to Mexico, where he remained until his death in 1959.
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, NY, Tate Britain, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Paalen's work has been featured in the exhibitions Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, Philadelphia Museum Art, Philadelphia, PA (2025-2026); 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. Gallery Wendi Norris has presented Paalen’s work since 2007, staging two solo exhibitions (2007 and 2014), which were each accompanied by scholarly exhibition catalogues.
Alice Rahon (1904, Chenecey-Buillon, France – 1987, Mexico City, Mexico) began her career as a poet, publishing three volumes before turning to painting in her mid-thirties. In 1931, she met Wolfgang Paalen, who introduced her to the Surrealist circle in Paris. She befriended many of the Surrealist artists, including André Breton, who championed her poetry, and Joan Miró, who suggested that she and Paalen visit the cave paintings of Altamira, a trip that proved formative to Rahon’s later visual work.
She married Paalen in 1934 and, in 1939, the two fled Europe for British Columbia, making their way south from Alaska and, at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, down the Pacific coast to Mexico City, where they would ultimately settle among émigré Surrealists including Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. After 1941, she devoted herself entirely to painting, working in ink, gouache, sand, pulverized volcanic rock, and found materials like feathers and butterfly wings, and using sgraffito to expose underlying layers of color. Her paintings drew on her visit to Altamira, a prior trip to an ashram in India, and on the indigenous art of the Americas, building an iconography she described as both universal and personal.
Rahon produced roughly 750 works over her lifetime and exhibited widely, including with Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century in New York, Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City, and the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA). Her work is held by MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, among others.
Recent exhibitions include Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, Philadelphia Museum Art, Philadelphia, PA (2025-2026); The Milk of Dreams at the 2022 Venice Biennale; and Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Met and Tate Modern (2021–2022). Two major paintings by Rahon are currently on view in the Tate Modern’s blockbuster exhibition, Frida: The Making of an Icon (2026-2027). Rahon’s debut exhibition with Gallery Wendi Norris was presented in 2022.
