Born in Vienna in 1905, his family moved to Berlin in 1912 and again to Rome in 1919. He was influenced by Julius Meier-Graefe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the Gestalt painters. After a stint in Berlin he went to study in Paris and Cassis (1925/26) where he met Jean Varda and Georges Braque. He visited the art school of Hans Hofmann in Munich as well. He became a member of the Surrealists in 1936 and would participate in all their major exhibitions. Inventor of the automatic technique fumage in which the artist would use the smoke of a kerosene lamp or a candle to create a mark on canvas or paper, which served as the beginning image for a more complete painting. In addition to Paalen, Salvador Dalí used the fumage technique extensively.
Paalen came to the United States in 1939 and then went to Mexico in autumn of the same year at the request of Frida Kahlo. While in Mexico he would co-curate the International Surrealist Exhibition in the Galeria de Arte Mexicano in 1940. His work and his theoretical magazine Dyn were well known in New York during the war years and had a great influential on the burgeoning New York School. Paalen came to the San Francisco Bay area in 1949 and along with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican started the Dynaton group. He would later return to Mexico where he took his own life in 1959.
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Under a revolutionary, emancipatory spell: Venice exhibition explores Surrealism’s interest in the occult
The Art Newspaper APR 2022Major show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection includes works by leading lights of Surrealism, including Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning Waiting for their visas to...Read more -
Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity Co- Curator, Gražina Subelytė Interviewed
Christie's MAR 2022As the exhibition Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity opens in Venice, its curator Gražina Subelytė talks to Christie's about the role of the occult in...Read more -
Wolfgang Paalen Retrospective at the Belvedere Museum Vienna
Oct 4, 2019He was the only Austrian in the circle of Parisian Surrealists, at Frida Kahlo’s invitation he moved to Mexico, and he influenced American artists Jackson...Read more -
Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University
Sep 3, 2019Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein is a groundbreaking exhibition that explores how modern art was influenced by advances in science, from Einstein’s...Read more -
Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein at BAMPFA
Nov 7, 2018In the early twentieth century, inspired by modern science such as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, an emerging avant-garde movement sought to expand the “dimensionality”...Read more -
Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy, and the Avant-Garde the Barbican
Oct 10, 2018Featuring the biggest names in Modern Art, Modern Couples explores creative relationships, across painting, sculpture, photography, design and literature. Meet the artist couples that forged...Read more -
I had an Interesting French Artist to See Me this Summer at the Vancouver Art Gallery
Jul 1, 2016This first pairing of the Modernist painters Wolfgang Paalen (1905–1959) and Emily Carr (1871–1945) will tell the story of how the artists met in Victoria,...Read more