Continuing through October 24, 2026

“Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two filters become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.”

— André Breton, introductory essay on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, “Anthology of Black Humor (Anthologie de l’humour noir),” 1940

Surrealism’s afterlife is increasingly visible in contemporary art, although its influence extends well beyond the revival of a particular style. From feminist speculative visions to aesthetic responses to ecological uncertainty, artists continue to explore the unstable boundaries between the real and the imagined. At a moment when familiar structures of reality are increasingly difficult to sustain, Surrealism offers not simply a means of reflecting a disorienting world, but an invitation to imagine other realities.

Seen in this light, Wolfgang Paalen & Alice Rahon, “Worlds Gone and to Come” offers more than a historical revival. The first dedicated two-person exhibition of the couple’s work brings together two individuals whose lives and artistic paths were deeply intertwined, even as each developed a distinctive vision. It also opens a window onto an expanded history of Surrealism and postwar abstraction whose significance for the San Francisco Bay Area remains insufficiently recognized.

Austria-born Paalen and Rahon, a French native, met in Paris, married in 1934, and left Europe in 1939 for an ambitious journey to North America. Planning to visit Canada and the West Coast before traveling to Mexico at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, they stopped briefly in San Francisco to visit the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. They eventually settled in Mexico, where they joined a community of artists displaced by war and political upheaval. That cultural environment profoundly shaped their work. Paalen, in particular, became absorbed in pre-Hispanic art and culture, archaeology, ethnography, and scientific speculation. These encounters informed his search for an expanded visual language capable of bringing ancient cosmologies into conversation with imagined futures. Rahon, already a poet and participant in André Breton’s Parisian Surrealist circle, approached painting through a different constellation of interests: language, landscape, myth, and the material possibilities of color and surface.

Their shared history did not lead to a shared aesthetic. Paalen’s paintings retained recognizable Surrealist strategies, using enigmatic forms and dreamlike spaces, conceived to unsettle the familiar, are evocative of Yves Tanguy’s biomorphic abstractions. His experiments with fumage, a technique in which smoke produces shifting traces on a surface, introduced chance into the act of painting. Works such as “La Balance—rêve interprété, vue gothique” (1937) and “Paysage totémique” (1937) invite closer examination of the relationship between Surrealist imagery, the unconscious, and the search for alternative ways of understanding reality.

Rahon’s paintings follow a less immediately recognizable Surrealist trajectory. Her early engagement with poetry and the visual culture of modernism gave way to an increasingly independent visual language of geometric forms, gestural marks, and richly saturated color. The arrangement of shapes in “La cuadra (The Block)” (1942–50) reveals her interest in the structural possibilities of abstraction. Inspired by Paul Klee’s “Book of Cities,” the painting also reflects his chessboard patterns and luminous colors. By contrast, her deep-blue paintings “Amanecer en el fondo del mar” and “El profeta (Campos de caña)” (both 1962) reflect her growing interest in aquatic and maritime themes as well as her conception of the ocean as a mysterious landscape of the subconscious. Created with oil and sand on canvas, these works evoke submerged landscapes, their shifting depths hovering between the recognizable and the imagined. Rahon’s work suggests that Surrealism’s imaginative possibilities need not depend on the conspicuous imagery of dreams; they can also reside in the sensations of color, texture, and space.

The subsequent trajectories of Paalen and Rahon further distinguish their contributions. After their marriage ended in 1947, Paalen moved to Mill Valley, where he joined Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican in developing Dynaton, a movement whose name derives from the Greek word for “the possible.” Rather than simply extending Surrealism, the group sought a new conception of pictorial space, drawing on abstraction, scientific speculation, spiritual thought, and encounters with Indigenous visual traditions. In 1951 the San Francisco Museum of Art presented the landmark Dynaton exhibition, formally titled “A New Vision: Wolfgang Paalen, Lee Mullican, Gordon Onslow-Ford.” The exhibition helped establish Dynaton as a significant development in postwar abstraction, and shaped the reception of Surrealism in the Bay Area.

Rahon, meanwhile, received recognition through exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art and a solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1945. A major venue for European modernism and Surrealism, the gallery provided an important platform for Rahon’s work. This recognition complicates any account that places Paalen at the center of the story while treating Rahon as a secondary figure. She continued to develop her own approach to painting, drawing on poetry, landscape, and myth to create a visual language at once material and elusive.

“Worlds Gone and to Come” was planned in conjunction with a recent symposium at SFMOMA marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the museum’s “A New Vision” exhibition. Together, these events bring renewed attention to the Bay Area’s role in Surrealism’s development. The exhibition achieves something distinct: placing Paalen’s work in explicit dialogue with Rahon’s makes visible both their shared intellectual history and the independence of their aesthetic visions.

Encountering Rahon’s and Paalen’s paintings together reminds us that Surrealism was never simply a fixed historical style, but a set of possibilities that continued to evolve across locations, relationships, and creative practices. “Worlds Gone and to Come” recovers a significant chapter in that history while implying that it still matters. The past is not simply behind us, and the future is not yet fully imaginable. Between them lies the work of artists who sought — and urge us to continue pursuing — new ways of seeing.