If you don’t know the work of artist Marie Wilson, you’re not alone. But with the California-born artist now on the verge of long overdue mainstream rediscovery, you will soon.
“Marie Wilson: A Poet of Forms and Colors” marks the American surrealist artist’s first solo show in San Francisco in more than 40 years. On view through March 14 at Gallery Wendi Norris, it features 16 paintings and seven works on paper, charting her early, biomorphic forms and surreal landscapes to the symmetrical compositions that came to define her practice.
“There were some people who were just completely amazed by her and thought, ‘why isn’t she world famous?’,” said Wilson’s daughter Zoe Valaoritis in a recent video interview with the Chronicle. “And then there were people who didn’t understand (her work.) It’s that old theme that people were not yet ready for her message.”
Wendi Norris, who has been a major force in the renaissance of 20th century female surrealists — including Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and Alice Rahon — noted that when Wilson was creating, “she was never really making it to sell or exhibit. It was just something intuitive, an internal force of nature that made her feel compelled to create.”
Her move to Paris in 1952 with Dynaton artist Wolfgang Paalen, whose estate is also represented by Norris, marked a major turning point in her work. She was exhibited by famed surrealist André Breton and later began to more deeply investigate occultism and global spirituality, including Indigenous American traditions. During this period, she intensified her use of automatism, a technique in which the artist suppresses conscious thought to allow their unconscious minds to guide the creation process.
Her last show in San Francisco was in 1984 when Lawrence Ferlinghetti presented “Apparitions: The Mythical World of Marie Wilson” at City Lights Bookstore.
Wilson’s interest in spiritual themes calls to mind Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), another woman artist whose work gained widespread recognition only in recent years, notably with a major 2018 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum.
Thankfully, the world will not have to wait as long to know Wilson’s art and story.
By the mid-1950s, Wilson developed her signature symmetrical style, influenced by Navajo, Pacific Northwestern and Tibetan traditions. She created the works in a ritualistic, almost trance-like state of automatism. Valaoritis said that the only conscious preparation her mother took in making the paintings was to draw a line down the canvas.
Wilson’s interest in symmetry was also “linked to her belief about the beauty in everyone,” Valaoritis continued. “She used to say we are symmetrical beings. We are of nature, which she considered profoundly sacred, and thus symmetry is innate within us.”
Wilson’s work from the 1950s at Gallery Wendi Norris shows the dramatic transition between her biomorphic form to her symmetrical pieces. In “Angel Stretching its Wing” (1952-54), the grit of the sand mixed with the oil paints gives the piece a rough texture that grounds the celestial figure. “Perpetual Revolution” (1952-54), meanwhile, feels bursting with kinetic energy, like the paint could leap off the canvas. It also seems to anticipate her deepening interest in Indigenous American art.
“This piece has the most work almost on a per square inch basis,” Norris noted. “And you see these early formations of symmetry. There’s several different areas where she’s going towards the symmetrical.”
The oil and sand painting, “Going Back in Time” (1952-54), with its swirls of orange, yellow and brown, also points toward her later symmetrical work.
As the exhibition moves into her work from the late 1950s, it’s startling to glance at the dates and realize how quickly her practice evolved.
The symmetrical painting “The Birth of the Celestial Monkey” (1957), for instance, has such a strong nod to Mayan and Aztec aesthetics I initially thought it must be from decades later when such influences were being more widely rediscovered. Likewise, “Rites of Passage” (1957-58), with its Southwestern turquoise, sandy hues and references to Navajo art.
By the time we get to her work from the 1960s, such as “Pillar of the Central Void” (1961-62), her aesthetic is at its full flowering with such an abundance of color and form that it’s easy to get lost in the design.
This exhibition is proof that not only is Wilson an artist we should have known about long before 2026, but that the art world is still playing catch up when it comes to broadening the 20th century canon.
