SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Gallery Wendi Norris announced exclusive representation of the estate of Marie Wilson (1922, Cedarville, CA – 2017, Athens, Greece).
Over the course of six decades, Wilson produced a revelatory and singular body of work that was rooted equally in the cultural and spiritual milieu of Northern California and the Bay Area of her youth, and in the intellectual currents of European surrealism, which she experienced while living and working among the movement’s central figures. Through biomorphic and geometric forms—ranging from semi-abstract arrangements to the exactingly symmetrical compositions of her mature period—Wilson created oil paintings, drawings in ink and pencil, lithographs, and ceramics that explored new surrealist horizons and expanded the possibilities of modern art.
“Many of us will be encountering Marie Wilson for the first time, and yet her visionary work is so confident, so knowing, that it feels as if it has been with us forever,” said Wendi Norris. “Marie’s deep ties to surrealism, marked by the years she spent with such luminaries as Wolfgang Paalen and André Breton, shaped the contours of her artistic experimentations, while her connection to the Bay Area informed many of the spiritual qualities of her practice. The result is a transcendental artistic language that was uniquely her own: a poetic, masterful, and harmonious fusion of the sacred and the surreal.”
Marie Wilson (1922–2024) emerged from her Northern California upbringing with a conviction that she had “been born an artist.” After studying art at Mills College, Oakland, and the University of California, Berkeley, she entered the Bay Area’s vibrant postwar avant-garde, guided by the Greek artist Jean Varda and British surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford and drawn into the intellectual circle of the influential Dynaton movement.
Her move to Paris in 1952 marked a turning point. Through Austrian surrealist and theorist Wolfgang Paalen, she encountered the leading figures of European surrealism—notably André Breton, the co-founder of the movement—while deepening her engagement with automatism, occultism, and global spiritual traditions. Early works from this period fused lyrical abstraction with biomorphic, mosaic-like forms, reflecting a synthesis of surrealist experimentation and her longstanding interest in Indigenous American, pre-Columbian, and other non-Western mythologies.
By the mid-1950s, Wilson had forged an unmistakable, signature style: symmetrical, meticulously rendered, spiritually charged compositions that she approached with intense concentration and an almost ritualistic method. Inspired by "outsider" visionaries such as Fleury Joseph Crépin and Augustin Lesage, she developed a deliberate form of automatism. Her work from this period and beyond, including collaborations with her husband, the poet Nanos Valaoritis, reveals a visual language that echoes Navajo sand paintings, Tibetan mandalas, and Pacific Northwest art—a confluence of the cosmic and the totemic.
“My work is like charting out an unknown territory.” — Marie Wilson
On January 20, 2026, Gallery Wendi Norris will open Marie Wilson: A Poet of Forms and Colors, the first major solo exhibition in San Francisco of her work since 1984, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti presented Apparitions: The Mythical World of Marie Wilson at City Lights Bookstore.
The exhibition, on view through March 14, 2026, coincides with Gallery Wendi Norris' debut presentation at San Francisco's FOG Design+Art Fair, which will also feature a selection of major works from Wilson's career.
