Face
Wolfgang Paalen
WOLFGANG PAALEN, 1946. OIL ON CANVAS.
As Europe was moving towards representative art under the Surrealist guidance of André Breton, a counter-insurgency was brewing. In their shared city of Paris, a group of artists that included Paalen formed Abstraction-Creation as a rebellion against the surrealist style that was dominating the cultural epoch. It embraced the entire field of abstract art amongst it’s many members, but prioritised the austere; geometric forms, mathematical compositions and reductively elegant shapes stood proudly in the face of the figurative subconscious. Yet Paalen, like many other members of the group, eventually succumbed to the allure of Surrealism and became a fully fledged member of the group. It was only once part of it’s fabric did he truly understand what it was he had rebelled against in the first place, finding the pseudo-religious, obsessively interior motifs of the surrealists as an insufficient way to true spirituality and enlightenment. He abandoned the group and spent years in exile in Mexico, pioneering a new, uniquely Paalen form of art that combined ideas of quantum theory with totemism, psycho-analysis and Marxist critique.