Gallery Wendi Norris Presents
Alice Rahon and Ranu Mukherjee:
Time WarriorsSeptember 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.
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 | Alice Rahon, La noche de Tepoztlán, 1964, oil and sand on canvas, 27 1/2 x 33 7/8 inches
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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 |
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Alice Rahon, ¡Torito, Toro!, 1951,
oil and sand on canvas, 28 3/4 x 23 3/5 inches. |
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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 GalerÃa 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 BrasÃlia (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. |
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 | 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 |
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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. |
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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 MarÃa 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.
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