Alice Rahon: Unveiling the Immanent

Frieze Masters 2021 October 13-17, 2021 Regent’s Park London, UK

Asked by a reporter if she belonged to any particular school of , replied, “I think I am a cave painter.” Like her artwork, Rahon’s response is profoundly textured, deceptively self-effacing, and devastatingly honest. Rahon was a ‘cave painter’ in the most fundamental sense: Her creations express talismanic and ritualistic powers that transcend her time and influences. Her act upon the viewer; they are experienced rather than merely seen.

Starting as a poet and emerging as a painter in the late 1930s from within the Parisian group led by André Breton, Rahon realized the Surrealist ideal of achieving union between the visual and the poetic image. This underappreciated and overlooked artist had through her own work and in her numerous collaborative projects a strong influence on her contemporaries (Breton, , Joan Miró, , Anaïs Nin, ) and a lasting effect on Mexican modernism that can be seen in the work of , Manuel Felguérez, José Luis Cuevas, and many others.

Building upon the new scholarship published by Gallery Wendi Norris in the first monograph on Alice Rahon (April 2021), this presentation at Frieze Masters features quintessential paintings and sculpture dated from the 1940s through the 1970s. Each of these pieces displays the remarkable movement between surface and depth, material and meaning, that is a hallmark of Rahon’s achievement as an artist. These are works that vibrate with a thickness both literal and metaphoric. They unveil the immanent.

Images: Painting for a Little Ghost Who Couldn’t Learn to Read & Untitled (assemblage)

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