About the artist:

Wolfgang Robert Paalen was an Austrian-Mexican painter, sculptor, and art philosopher. A member of the Abstraction-Création group from 1934 to 1935, he joined the influential Surrealist movement in 1935 and was one of its prominent exponents until 1942. Whilst in exile in Mexico, he founded his own counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN, in which he summarized his critical attitude towards radical subjectivism and Freudo-Marxism in Surrealism with his philosophy of contingency. He rejoined the group between 1951 and 1954, during his sojourn in Paris.

In Paris he studied for a short time with Fernand Léger and in 1933 became a member of the Abstraction-Création group. He left the group in 1935, together with Hans Arp and Jean Hélion. His work at this time was inspired by Paul Valéry's Eupalinos and tends to macerate and condensate the abstract hardliners with regard to the Surrealists. The pictorial results may be seen as language games: testing the point to which concrete forms may be reduced to latency and the point where they transmit multiple meanings. Paalen anticipated with this research, in a certain sense, the later attempts of such abstractionists as Mark Rothko (Multiforms) and Arshile Gorky and amplified his attempts to visualize his idea of human perception as deeply linked to a cosmic texture of latent or possible contents, with whom every organism is interweaved. In 1934 he married the French poet Alice Phillipot, later known as Alice Rahon and again met frequently with Roland Penrose and his wife Valentine Boué, who brought the Paalens into contact with Paul Éluard. In the summer of 1935 he spent some time at the castle home of Lise Deharme, where he met the Parisian Surrealists and André Breton. An intense friendship developed almost immediately, and Breton involved his new adept in surrealist activities such as the Exposition surréaliste d'objets, which opened at the Galerie Charles Ratton in 1936. Here, Paalen showed L´heure exacte (The Exact Time), a clock with glass eyes and feather hands, which was displayed next to Giacometti's Boule suspendue (Suspended Ball). A small glazed showcase with clay idols called Aux bons soins du navigateur (At the Mercy of the Navigator) was shown, as was Le passage à niveau (The Level Crossing), a wooden root elegantly leaning on a cork wall, along with two other objects made of roots: Le crâne de Voltaire (Voltaire's Skull) and Les cerveaux de Rembrandt (Rembrandt's Brains). That same year Paalen had a solo exhibition of paintings in Paris at the Galerie Pierre, owned by Breton's friend Pierre Loeb. Breton and Penrose included him in the organization of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, where he presented twelve oils, gouaches and objects as well as his first fumage (Dictated by a Candle) representing a ghostly hand performing the act of painting. The contact with Breton deepened during that time and Paalen also participated in the design of Breton's Galerie Gradiva. There he met and worked with Marcel Duchamp and presented his object Chaise envahie de lierre, acquired in the gallery by Marie-Laure de Noailles, who installed it in her famous bathroom, mentioned and illustrated in Harper's Bazaar in April 1938.