Gallery Wendi Norris exhibition:Time Warriors, Sept. 6-Oct.-7 , 2023,

Ranu Mukherjee, bitter skin, 2023, pigment, ink, crystalina, and UV inkjet print on silk and cotton sari fabric on linen, 72 x 72 inches.

Gallery Wendi Norris Presents Alice Rahon and Ranu Mukherjee:  Time Warriors September 6 – October 7, 2023 529 West 20th Street Ground Floor New York City  Time Warriors is Gallery Wendi Norris’s second offsite exhibition in New York following Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg in 2019. The exhibition furthers the gallery's decades long commitment to presenting modern and contemporary artworks in conversation. Opening Party September 6, 6 pm Poetry Reading, Refreshments and Artist's Conversation Saturday September 9, 4-6 pm Noted Scholar Mary Ann Caws reads from her translation of Shapeshifter by Alice Rahon. Artists Chitra Ganesh and Ranu Mukherjee in Conversation.    Alice Rahon, La noche de Tepoztlán, 1964, oil and sand on canvas, 27 1/2 x 33 7/8 inches    New York, September 4, 2023: The themes and concerns alive in the work of Ranu Mukherjee and Alice Rahon cross generational boundaries and offer viewers the opportunity to consider ideas rooted in nature, materiality, and transcendence. Alice Rahon and Ranu Mukherjee: Time Warriors presents artworks that examine issues of migration and identities, our changing landscapes and environmental concerns, across history and into the future.    On view in New York City September 6 - October 7, 2023 at 529 West 20th Street on the ground floor, the exhibition includes approximately 20 mixed media artworks spanning the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, depicting how both artists innovate across media to further investigate their themes. “Beyond presenting the work of two artists who I admire and am proud to represent,” said Wendi Norris, “Time Warriors invites audiences to explore the way their work, from different perspectives and across generations, shares ideas and themes as an open conversation. It is striking how both Rahon and Mukherjee experienced a world in immense turmoil and have harnessed this energy to create deeply poetic and personal explorations of time and expression.”   In the case of Rahon (b. Chenecey-Buillon, France, 1904; d. Mexico City, 1987), she utilizes sand and the earth as well as found objects in many of her compositions, and famously refers to herself as "a cave painter," having delved back in time and through her experiences with indigenous cultures in Mexico to render uniquely timeless, stylistic compositions.    Mukherjee (b. Boston, 1966) similarly explores the changing environments. Using the forest as a means of expressing connection with nature and time, she innovatively prints present day mass media images from climate change and feminist protests onto jamdani sari fabrics that are collaged into her paintings, often appearing as hybrid or invented groves of banyan, aspen, or black cherry trees.     Both artists take inspiration from India, Indian culture, and concepts of being and time. Rahon’s first volume of poetry was published in 1936 upon her return from a sojourn in India with fellow poet and artist, Valentine Penrose. Many of her poems and paintings address nature and mysticism, as well as the duality and union of humanity and nature. Mukherjee draws from her ancestry in India, poetically utilizing sari cloths as her canvas, investigating the transformation of its material as well as the multiplicity of ideas in her layered images.   Rahon once described a process of hers as “a type of enchantment, like the development of photos in a tray—little by little, the forms emerge.” Likewise, Mukherjee utilizes a layered process of printing on textiles and then putting them down in the color fields. “While my compositions are very planned out, it is also like printing in a darkroom and watching the image emerge,” says Mukherjee. “The chemistry between the printed patterns and the fabric and then the colors and images in paint is really exciting and the process often seems magical.” On Saturday September 9, from 4 pm to 6 pm, Gallery Wendi Norris and NYRB Poets present refreshments, conversation and poetry featuring renowned scholar Mary Ann Caws reading from Shapeshifter, her new translation of Alice Rahon’s poems, followed by cocktails and a conversation between gallery artists Chitra Ganesh and Ranu Mukherjee. The event celebrates the opening of Alice Rahon and Ranu Mukherjee: Time Warriors on view September 6 - October 7, 2023 at Gallery Wendi Norris, 529 West 20th Street ground floor, New York City. www.gallerywendinorris.com   Alice Rahon, ¡Torito, Toro!, 1951, oil and sand on canvas, 28 3/4 x 23 3/5 inches.  About Alice Rahon Alice Rahon (née Alice Marie Yvonne Philippot) was born in Chenecey-Buillon, France, on June 8, 1904. After publishing three volumes of poetry, she turned to the visual arts at the age of thirty-six and spent her mature years working almost exclusively as a painter. Rahon died in Mexico City in 1987, a naturalized citizen of Mexico.   Little is known of Rahon’s childhood, but a brief account of her early years reveals an independent and charismatic young woman of prodigious talent. At some point during her twenties she moved to Paris, where she created hats for the Surrealist-influenced fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. She was introduced to Man Ray, for whom she modeled, and became friends with Joan Miró. In 1931 she met the Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959), who brought her into the circle of Surrealists led by André Breton. She and Paalen were married in 1934.    Once she started painting, Rahon was recognized almost immediately as an accomplished artist. The San Francisco Museum of Art (now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) presented the first of two solo museum exhibitions of her work in 1945. Over the course of her lifetime, Rahon would create roughly 750 works of art and go on to exhibit widely in the United States and Mexico, as well as in Paris and Lebanon. She exhibited regularly with prominent galleries that included Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in New York, Caresse Crosby in Washington, D.C., Stendhal and Copley Galleries in Los Angeles, and Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City. The Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City presented a solo Rahon show in 1986. Rahon’s work is currently in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, MO; the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX; and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, MA, among others.    There has been a resurgence of interest in Rahon’s visual and written work over the last decade, catalyzed by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 2012 show In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. In 2022 her artwork was featured in The Milk of Dreams, Venice Biennale, 59th International Art Exhibition. The Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City presented a retrospective of Rahon’s work in 2009. A subset of that exhibition was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami in 2019-2020, her first solo museum exhibition in the United States since 1953. Her work has also been featured in various museum exhibitions of Surrealism and Mexican modernism, including Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London (2021-2022); Fantastic Women at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2020); Modern Couples at the Centre Pompidou-Metz (2018); México 1900-1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco y las vanguardias at the Grand Palais, Paris, and the Dallas Museum of Art, TX (2017); Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2016-2017); Frida Kahlo: Conexões entre mulheres surrealistas no México, at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, the Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro, and the Caixa Cultural de Brasília (2015); and Farewell to Surrealism: The DYN Circle in Mexico at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA (2012-2013). In 2012, Aubé Breton Elléouët, the daughter of André Breton, produced a documentary on Alice Rahon’s life and work entitled Alice Rahon, l’abeille noire (Alice Rahon: The Black Bee). The Getty Research Institute is acquiring the Alice Rahon archive in its entirety. In 2021, NYRB Poets released a comprehensive collection of Rahon’s poetry, translated by Mary Ann Caws, that includes newly discovered letters and poems from Picasso, Breton, and Paalen, among others. In 2022, Gallery Wendi Norris released Alice Rahon, the first monograph on the painter-poet in English. This 128-page book is illustrated with highlights of her artwork from 1939 through the 1970s and includes an introduction by Wendi Norris and new research and essays by scholars Tere Arcq, Daniel Garza Usabiaga, and Maggie Borowitz, exploring her artistic techniques and unique place in art history.  Ranu Mukherjee, American black cherry, 2022, pigment, cristalina, pastel and UV inkjet print on silk and cotton sari fabric on linen, 72 x 96 inches About Ranu Mukherjee Ranu Mukherjee makes hybrid work in painting, moving image, and installation. Her work is marked by a deliberate use of saturated color, the collision of tempos, and sensual materiality. The numerous and often imperceptible layers she employs evoke questions of visibility, legibility, and abstraction. Her recent artwork is guided by the forces of ecology and non-human agency, diaspora and migration, motherhood, and transnational feminisms. Mukherjee’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles (2022-2023) de Young Museum, San Francisco (2018-2019); the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design (2017);  the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2016); the Tarble Art Center, Charleston, IL (2016) and the San Jose Museum of Art, CA (2012), among others. Her most recent immersive video installations have been was presented in Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022-2023, the 2019 Karachi Biennale (2019) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016) as well as in numerous international group exhibitions. Mukherjee has been awarded a Pollock Krasner Grant (2020); a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA (2019-20242); an 18th Street Arts Center Residency, Los Angeles (20220); Facebook Artist in Residence (2020);  de Young Museum Artist Studio Program (2017); the Space 118 Residency, Mumbai (2014); and a Kala Fellowship Award and Residency, Berkeley (2009). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; de Young Museum, San Francisco; the JP Morgan Chase Collection, New York; the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris; the Oakland Museum of California; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the San Francisco International Airport, among others.  In 2021 Gallery Wendi Norris released Shadowtime, a major monograph on Mukherjee's work over the past decade featuring a conversation with author and climate activist Amitav Ghosh, and an essay by Jodi Throckmorton, curator of Mukherjee's first solo museum exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art.  Mukherjee co-created Orphan Drift, a London-based cyber-feminist collective and avatar making combined media works since 1994. They have participated in numerous exhibitions and screenings internationally including in London, Oslo, Berlin, Oberhausen, Glasgow, Istanbul, Vancouver, Santiago, Capetown, and the Bay Area. Mukherjee received her B.F.A. in Painting, from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA in 1988, and her MFA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, UK in 1993.  Mukherjee lives and works in San Francisco. She is the Chair of the film program at California College of the Arts.  About Gallery Wendi Norris  Gallery Wendi Norris is a leading international art gallery with headquarters in San Francisco, California. The gallery holds decades-long relationships with 20th century luminaries such as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paalen, Remedios Varo, and Alice Rahon, artists whose nomadic and visionary practices interrogated the aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical movements of their times. The gallery also represents María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chitra Ganesh, Julio César Morales, Ranu Mukherjee, Eva Schlegel, Peter Young, and other contemporaries, artists whose work similarly flows across disciplines, continents, and generations as they speculate on the present moment.   Opened in 2002, Gallery Wendi Norris remains committed to its founding principles of rigorous programming, development of artists’ legacies, public accessibility, and cultural significance. To those ends, the gallery hosts visiting academics, sponsors artist talks, and publishes highly-researched books with original contributions from international scholars. The gallery actively supports artists in engaging new audiences through influential commercial, biennial, and institutional collaborations. Pioneering an offsite exhibition model in 2017, the gallery produces public-facing artworks and shows wherever they might reach the widest viewership and provide the deepest impact. Working in concert with major museums, private collectors, and innovative curators, Gallery Wendi Norris builds enduring, well-represented collections for its respected array of international clients. Upcoming Exhibition: Ambreen Butt, November 9 - December 23, 2023.  #gallerywendynorris#fineartmagazine#fineartfun

Eileen Agar, Wings of a Child 1983, Acrylic on canvas, 41 x 61 cm;

Gallery Wendi Norris Announces Representation of the Estate of Eileen Agar  In 2023 the gallery will mount the first US solo exhibition of Agar's work SAN FRANCISCO, October 4, 2022.  Gallery Wendi Norris is proud to announce its representation of the estate of Eileen Agar (1899-1991).   An artist whose life spanned nearly the entire 20th century, Eileen Agar was a radical woman of her times: transcontinental worldliness simultaneously deeply informed and belied her highly personal, unconventional artworks. Born in Argentina to Scottish and American parents, Agar was, from the outset, a traveler. With her formative youth spent in South America and adulthood in the United Kingdom and Europe, her external travels were mirrored by internal explorations, mining her own and society’s unconscious to produce works that consistently align and juxtapose the recognizable with the mysterious.   “I am honored to work with this important material, '' said Wendi Norris. “In 2023 my gallery will present the first solo exhibition for Eileen Agar in the United States. We will introduce her work to our global audience at Frieze Masters in the form of an homage to Agar’s use of nature as her muse, alongside similarly-themed paintings and drawings by peers Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, and Dorothea Tanning.”   Agar is often categorized as a surrealist, but her vast oeuvre reveals both her versatility and her dedication to a variety of forms and contexts that make this nomenclature too constrained. In fact, the artist Shezad Dawood has said of her, “She is so much more than one artist. She is at least five artists in one,” a statement which not only refers to her ability to shape-shift, but also makes her enormously relevant to the many contemporary artists who are committed to a transdisciplinarity that she fully embraced.   Indeed, Agar engaged in painting, drawing, collage, bricolage, photography, and the production of a journal titled The Island that, tellingly, combined nature and mysticism, enduring themes for the artist. Agar’s form of surrealism is one that creates sparks between unrelated objects and forms. Rather than cultivating an interest in autonomism, Agar’s selections were highly intentional and bore a formal and spiritual relationship to one another. From pinning actual starfish and other items from the sea to collages and into sculptures, to embedding crocheted elements into paintings, Agar produced images and forms that are both recognizable and mysterious.   For example, her Marine Object from 1939 conjoins a fragment of an amphora she found in fishermen’s nets amidst their haul, which she combined with shells and other flotsam from the sea. She balances this with a ram’s horn to create an object that melds the terrestrial with the oceanic, in a characteristically awkwardly balanced form. It seems to be at once something that could be found on the beach, a relic of another time, or a devotional object.   Agar also melded organic forms with geometries and abstraction, most visible in paintings that figured both. Take, for instance, her 1963 painting Apocalyptic Head, which combines a contoured face staring out of the panel within a frame of abstraction. Starburst forms invade the forehead while two brown and beige verticals create an architecture that holds the head in place. This is surrounded by other starbursts and squiggles in blue, green, and black, as well as a familiar shell form, which together give the impression of a turbulent sea surrounding the distraught portrait. The combination of abstraction with organic and figural elements, both real and imagined, together create a possibility of alternate worlds, conjoining surrealism and abstraction in ways more integrated than typically acknowledged in mainstream art history. Eileen Agar, Homage to the Scissor, n.d., Sculpture, 25 x 11 cm; About Eileen Agar   Born in Buenos Aires, Agar moved to England aged seven and went on to study art at the Brook Green School and then at the Slade before relocating to Paris in 1928. Over the course of her career, Agar would associate with artists including Henry Moore, Andre Breton, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Nash, and with writers such as Joseph Bard, Ezra Pound, and Paul Eluard. Throughout the 1930s, she produced a series of sculptures and assemblages that were inspired by the discarded shells, bones, and bits of plankton she would collect while beachcombing on the French coast. One of her most notable assemblages from this time was Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse, a painted basket topped with pieces of bone, coral, lobster, and a starfish. Captured on film, Agar famously walked along the streets of London wearing this bizarre creation.   Agar was one of only a handful of women artists who took part in the seminal International Surrealist Exhibition at London's New Burlington Galleries in 1936, a landmark show that launched Surrealism in Britain. This was followed by inclusion later that year in Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. By the end of the decade, Agar had created one of her most important works, Angel of Anarchy, a blind-folded plaster head to which she added feathers, fabric, and diamante stones. Based on an earlier plaster head, Agar described wanting to make this new work "more powerful, more astonishing, more malign."   Aside from a solo show at the Redfern in 1942, Agar largely ceased exhibiting and making work during and just after World War II. A trip to Tenerife in 1953 instantly renewed and catalyzed her aesthetic powers. She completed a series of watercolors while there and, upon returning home, committed herself to the exploration of new subject matter and to new ways of making pictures. Henceforth working primarily as a painter, Agar experimented with automatism and became interested in the textural properties of paint. At some point in the late 50s, she began dripping and pouring enamel paint onto canvas or glass, resulting in a series of beguiling, abstracted images.   In 1965, Agar turned her hand to the fast-drying medium of acrylics, allowing her to further experiment with pigment and color combinations. Among the most notable of her acrylic paintings are those inspired by the famous rocks of Ploumanach. Agar had initially documented the rocks in 1936 with a series of haunting black and white photographs that emphasized their strange, anthropomorphic qualities. Several decades later, Agar employed heightened color, jarring juxtapositions, and altered perspectives in her reinterpretation of these rocks. Publishing an autobiography and winning election to the Royal Academy on either side of her ninetieth birthday, she remained imaginatively and productively undiminished to the very end.   Since her death in 1991, Agar’s influence and reputation have continued to deepen. Agar retrospectives have been held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Pallant House Gallery, the Jerwood, and the Whitechapel Gallery. In the past two years, Agar’s work has been included in the 59th Venice Biennale and Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Tate Modern, London. Eileen Agar, Figures Under Water, 1962, Oil on board, 30 x 40 cm   About Gallery Wendi Norris   Gallery Wendi Norris is a leading international art gallery with headquarters in San Francisco, California. The gallery holds decades-long relationships with 20th century luminaries such as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paalen, Remedios Varo, and Alice Rahon, artists whose nomadic and visionary practices interrogated the aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical movements of their times. The gallery also represents María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chitra Ganesh, Julio César Morales, Ranu Mukherjee, Eva Schlegel, Peter Young, and other contemporaries, artists whose work similarly flows across disciplines, continents, and generations as they speculate on the present moment.   Opened in 2002, Gallery Wendi Norris remains committed to its founding principles of rigorous programming, development of artists’ legacies, public accessibility, and cultural significance.To those ends, the gallery hosts visiting academics, sponsors artist talks, and publishes highly-researched books with original contributions from international scholars. The gallery actively supports artists in engaging new audiences through influential commercial, biennial, and institutional collaborations. Pioneering an offsite exhibition model in 2017, the gallery produces public-facing artworks and shows wherever they might reach the widest viewership and provide the deepest impact. Working in concert with major museums, private collectors, and innovative curators, Gallery Wendi Norris builds enduring, well-represented collections for its respected array of international clients. For more information visit www.gallerywendinorris.com      CONNECT WITH US

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