16 January 2025
“I bought my first Dorothea Tanning as a gallerist about 21 years ago,” art dealer Wendi Norris said in a recent interview. “So it’s been a while.”
Norris, whose gallery is in San Francisco, accumulated and sold Tannings before staging a solo exhibition of her work in 2009, three years before the artist died at the age of 101. Since then, she has held two more at the gallery and included her work in numerous group shows.
Attention to Tanning’s work has grown dramatically in the last few years, thanks in no small part to her star billing at the 2022 Venice Biennale and the broader spike in interest in female Surrealists. However, it’s both alarming and, in a sense, encouraging that the market for the pioneering figure appears to have a lot of more room for growth, which is the view held by many experts.
When she worked with Tanning, Norris said, the artist “knew where she wanted things placed and she knew how she wanted to be positioned. She was very exacting with me.”
Those efforts have helped develop a solid, but by no means frothy, market for Tanning. Her auction record, set in 2022, stands at $1.4 million, for Le mal oublié (1955). That is paltry compared to the record for Carrington, which leapt to $28.5 million last year, from a previous high of $3.3 million.
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