Wolfgang Paalen: Implicit Spaces

San Francisco - Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present Implicit Spaces, the most comprehensive exhibition of Surrealist painter and thinker Wolfgang Paalen to be mounted in the United States in over 50 years. Over 20 fumages (images made in wet paint using a candle’s smoky traces to suggest forms), oil paintings, and works on paper will be complemented by an extensive archive of photos and ephemera, contextualizing Paalen’s impact on ideas and practices among artists in the United States during and after World War II. Paalen's last exhibitions in San Francisco included a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in 1948 and the Dynaton show at the same institution in 1950 (with fellow artists Lee Mullican and Gordon Onslow Ford).

Born in 1905 in Vienna, Paalen was a cosmopolitan world traveler, amateur philosopher and archaeologist, poet, writer, and collector of totemic artifacts. Suffering from a quintessential German romanticism and an ongoing clinical manic-depression, his influential, volatile, and emotional journey would end in suicide in Taxco, Mexico in 1959.

In his essay in the accompanying catalogue, Andreas Neufert, Director of the Wolfgang Paalen Archive in Berlin, makes a strong case that one of the most important and influential of the exiled Surrealists in New York during World War II was Paalen. More specifically, it was Paalen who introduced new concepts of space in painting as a resonant expression of metaphysics. These ideas exerted a strong influence on those who would later become America’s first generation of Abstract Expressionists, particularly artists like Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. This was Paalen’s Promethean gift, heralding the next dominant chapter of 20th century art history.

Several of the finest works of Paalen’s short career, oil and fumage paintings such as the large Taches solaires (1938) and Ciel de pieuvre (1938), will exhibit for the first time in this country in over half a century – both paintings hung in Paalen’s American debut at the historic Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1940. Paalen was one of the first Surrealists to arrive in New York, and this exhibition was attended by many of the critics, curators, and artists who would later become the luminaries of Abstract Expressionism.

Other paintings range from the intimate abstraction Les cosmogones (1943) to the gargantuan and mystical Hamnur Trilogy (1947), along with small works on paper, pure fumages, and simple drawings that show the genesis of Paalen’s fragile and polymath mind, beginning with his Brothers Karamazov (1922). Works such as Untitled (fumage/encrage) demonstrate automatist techniques Paalen pioneered, processes designed to “turn off” the discursive mind and expose the unconscious mind through art making.