The gallery will also showcase Varo’s drawing “Aprendiz de Ícaro” (“Icarus’s Apprentice”) (1959), which seems the most traditionally Surrealist of the works, with its elongated central figure seemingly poised between the spiritual and physical worlds. In Mexico, Varo became close friends with Carrington, with the pair parsing similar themes in their work.
Rahon, perhaps the least well known of the artists (often overshadowed by her husband at the time, Paalen) was close with Carrington and Varo, and has two works in the show.
Born in France, Rahon started as a poet in Paris and began painting in her mid-30s. She went on to create some 750 works of art, many quietly revolutionary in their technique.
Her piece “La Noche de Tepoztlán” (“The Night of Tepoztlán”) (1964), which has pride of place in Norris’s office, will be shown in London. In it, a full moon bathes a mountain valley in nocturnal light.
“Everything starts changing when Rahon puts sand in her work,” Norris explained, pointing out the textures on the canvas. “She starts with volcanic ash from the soil, and she’s the first one to do that in Mexico.”
“Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, they got that technique from her,” she added.
In an email interview, Susan Aberth, a professor of art history at Bard College and a scholar who has written on Surrealist women — including for a couple of Norris’s catalogs — said she hoped audiences at the Frieze show would come to appreciate the artists’ dialogues with other cultures.
“These Surrealists were long-term residents of Mexico who were often friends with the nation’s leading intellectuals and artists,” Aberth noted, “so they refrained from superficial inclusions and instead incorporated more nuanced cultural references into their work.”
Emanuela Tarrizo, the director of Frieze Masters, wrote in an email that the gallery was easy to welcome back to this year’s fair.
“Norris has always been pivotal in elevating underrecognized artists globally,” Tarrizo said. “What also makes her presentation compelling is how it weaves connections across time and place.”
Norris’s own journey to the art world has been far from linear. Standing in her gallery, she said she remembered “discovering art” in the 1990s while studying economics in Madrid. “I raised my hand and in Spanish asked, ‘What is the Prado?’” she recalled. “Because I’d never been to an art museum. When we went, I had goose bumps.”
Norris went on to earn an M.B.A. from Georgetown and worked in corporate roles until the dot-com crash prompted a career change. She opened a gallery with a co-owner, Raman Frey, in 2002. About a decade later, she became the sole owner.
Since starting as a dealer, Norris has worked to reshape the art market’s understanding of European Mexican Surrealists, particularly female artists. Her gallery is credited with bolstering the legacies of Carrington and Varo in particular.
In her email, Aberth recalled meeting Norris back in 2004 and reflected on the gallery’s work in elevating the women of Surrealism.
“Galleries bring up the value of works and facilitate getting works into museum collections, which ultimately helps secure artist reputations, especially those on the periphery for various, usually unfair, reasons,” Aberth wrote.
Norris is modest about her role. “I’ve not done this alone,” she said. “So much of it is advancing the work of others before me,” she added, citing her relationship with the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who wrote “Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement” and who, Norris said, first recommended that she meet Leonora Carrington back in the early 2000s.
Norris said she and Carrington went on to form a friendship and a working relationship that paved the way for the gallery to become a major dealer of the artist’s work. In 2019, the Museum of Modern Art acquired two Carringtons from Norris during a New York show, while the 2022 Venice Biennale was titled “The Milk of Dreams” after one of Carrington’s books.
By late morning, people were filtering into the San Francisco showroom, and Norris was still thinking about the show ahead, about the Carringtons heading to Frieze Masters‚ across the ocean.
“The ship Carrington depicted in ‘La Cuna’ and in the tapestry, for that matter, evokes a sense of migration,” Norris said, “and that’s something the artists in our presentation were deeply familiar with.” The works, she added, also have a “sense of the delightfully unexpected, and of magic,” something that once again all these artists found, in their own creative ways, in Mexico.
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