The New York Times | In London, a California Gallery Shows Expat Mexican Surrealists

For two decades, Gallery Wendi Norris has broadened and complicated ideas about Surrealism. Now she is bringing major Mexican-influenced works to Frieze Masters.

By Will Higginbotham

 

On a Friday morning in July, in the Jackson Square neighborhood of San Francisco, just a stone’s throw from the Transamerica Pyramid, the cafes and galleries were starting to buzz with anticipation of the weekend.

Wendi Norris was standing in one such gallery — her own — and considering the next big show, Frieze Masters, running alongside Frieze London, from Oct. 16 to 19 in Regent’s Park.

“Each year, it’s always a challenge, pulling together an exhibit that will hopefully tell some untold stories,” Norris said, standing in the small, light-filled showroom.

This year, she added, she was especially excited to spotlight Leonora Carrington, a British-born painter and novelist who spent much of her adult life in Mexico and is known mostly for her works on canvas. Norris headed downstairs, then stood before one Carrington piece bound for the fair: “La Cuna” (“The Cradle”) (circa 1945), which was not a painting at all but a wooden cradle shaped like a sailboat.

 

Carved by Carrington’s friend and collaborator José Horna for his daughter’s birth, the cradle features painted images by Carrington that wrap around the hull and depict a girl’s journey from birth to womanhood. The work is rich with magical beasts and symbolism, a sort of Surrealist take on an unfolding heroic adventure. What makes it an especially transfixing piece of art is knowing it was used and loved.

 

Nearby was another London-bound Carrington work, an untitled tapestry from the late 1940s and early ’50s, depicting priestly avian figures aboard a boat shaped like Quetzalcoatl, the Mesoamerican plumed serpent. The piece was a collaborative effort, with Carrington dreaming up the images, arrangement and color scheme, and master weavers from San Miguel Chiconcuac executing her vision on the loom.

 

“I love how both works show the breadth of her creative practice, working collaboratively across textile and wood sculpture,” Norris said, noting that those were “two media she was adept in but not frequently associated with.”

 

That breadth of practice could speak to Surrealism more broadly, and it is this expansive view of it that Gallery Wendi Norris celebrates. Often, Surrealism calls to mind two-dimensional paintings and artists at work in Paris, where André Breton officially consecrated the movement in 1924. Yet in the 1930s and ’40s, as fascism and war engulfed Europe, many Surrealists, like Carrington, left and emigrated to the Americas. With its comparatively easygoing immigration laws, Mexico quickly emerged as a hub where followers of the movement found refuge, inspiration and new ways of working.

 

The artists who arrived, like Carrington, Remedios Varo, Alice Rahon and Wolfgang Paalen, absorbed Indigenous techniques, mythologies and materials, creating an aesthetic that was Surrealist as well as distinctively Mexican. And so, at Frieze Masters, the gallery will highlight not only Carrington’s work but also this whole remarkable chapter in Surrealism’s history.

 

For instance, the gallery will show Paalen’s painting “Ardah” (1945), which this Austrian-born artist made while living in Mexico. He would later move briefly to the San Francisco Bay Area and found the short-lived Dynaton movement, which sought to create a sort of alternate Surrealism, embracing the unconscious, ancient cultures of the Americas, as well as Eastern philosophies like Zen.

 

“Paalen is foundational for the gallery,” Norris said. “When I’m stuck on something, I go back and read Paalen’s essays.”

 

At Frieze Masters, however, the female artists will command the most wall space. It is also their stories that demonstrate the many interactions and collaborations that happened within the expatriate Surrealist group.

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.
 
October 3, 2025