Supplier Who Rewrote the Historical past of Surrealism Makes Her Artwork Basel Debut

As of late, it’s exhausting to think about a time when everybody wasn’t speaking about Leonora Carrington’s artwork. In 2022, the Surrealist artist’s writings lent the Venice Biennale its title. Earlier this yr, a portray by her bought for $28.5 million at Sotheby’s following a 10-minute bidding conflict, setting a brand new public sale document for the artist. Subsequent yr, an unlimited survey of her artwork shall be staged in Italy.

However in 2002, when supplier Wendi Norris visited the British-born artist at her residence in Mexico, Carrington was identified primarily to Surrealism lovers. One was the artwork historian Whitney Chadwick, who wrote what’s now considered an important e-book about feminine Surrealists (now in its second version); Chadwick beneficial that Norris hunt down Carrington.

Norris, who was simply getting her begin as a supplier, adopted Chadwick’s tip, anticipating to spend only a few hours with the artist. She ended up chatting with Carrington all day—principally about politics and literature, not artwork, as was Carrington’s desire. However as a result of Norris didn’t initially come out of the artwork world, she introduced a perspective to Carrington’s work that the artist prized.

“I don’t have an artwork historical past background. I’ve an economics background,” the San Francisco–primarily based supplier informed ARTnews, talking by telephone. “She actually appreciated my means of viewing her work. She knew I used to be seeing one thing in a means that wasn’t by means of a scholarly lens, however in the best way most individuals in all probability would.”

That first go to was the beginning of a friendship and enterprise relationship between Norris and Carrington that lasted by means of the artist’s demise in 2011, and continues to at the present time by way of her property. In 2022, Norris’s gallery lent one of many 5 work by Carrington—Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), that includes a lithe determine whose neck sprouts a flowering department—that featured within the 2022 Venice Biennale. This week, her gallery will highlight Carrington’s artwork as soon as extra, this time at Artwork Basel, the world’s most preeminent artwork honest, the place Norris’s dealership is making its Swiss debut.

The sales space will function Portrait of Madame Dupin and different gems by Carrington, together with one piece that features textual content Carrington wrote backwards, in order that it is just legible when a mirror is held to it. (“I feel solely Carrington and Leonardo da Vinci had been in a position to do this,” Norris conjectured.) Sellers repeatedly deliver older works to Artwork Basel, however these Carringtons are more likely to be a number of the most artwork traditionally necessary items on the honest this yr.

Their presence in Norris’s sales space testifies to her dedication to Surrealism, a motion which her gallery has quietly helped rewrite previously decade. Though Norris’s gallery just isn’t restricted to Surrealism particularly, with up to date artists similar to Chitra Ganesh and María Magdalena Campos-Pons on her roster, it’s exhibits for modernists similar to Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paahlen, Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo which have outlined her programming. Norris has been exhibiting these artists for over a decade, however solely not too long ago have they begun showing repeatedly in blockbuster exhibitions that reassess Surrealism, usually by including extra ladies and non-European artists to the motion’s canon.

However, Norris mentioned, “I didn’t begin out desirous to signify Surrealists.” In reality, she didn’t begin out within the artwork world in any respect.

Whereas finding out economics throughout the ’90s, she hung out overseas in Madrid, the place she was given the choice to take one class exterior her chosen self-discipline. She selected to take an artwork historical past course, and as a part of it, she visited the Prado. “I bear in mind simply standing in entrance of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” she recalled. “I had goosebumps.”

Although she had a robust attachment to artwork, Norris continued to pursue a enterprise profession, graduating in 1996 from Georgetown College with an MBA and shortly taking a job as a Paris-based director of strategic planning for the biopharmaceutical firm Bristol Myers Squibb. After that, she labored for a number of years at Scale Eight, which she recollects as a “actually geeky knowledge storage firm that was in all probability forward of its time.”

Then the dot-com bubble burst, and Norris sought a brand new course. “I made a decision I wanted to alter what I used to be doing and do one thing that I beloved, and I simply type of got here to it naturally,” Norris mentioned of her transition to the artwork world. “I had no actual concept in regards to the artwork trade—and it is an trade. Fortunately, I had a enterprise background the place I analyzed industries, so I used to be capable of get a way of it. However it took some time.” She went on to open her eponymous gallery in 2002.

Gallerists are typically not keen on speaking publicly about their companies in percentages and numbers, however Norris credit her enterprise background with making her comfy with doing simply that. In 2017, amid a wave of gallery closures, Norris made the choice to show her house nomadic, staging exhibits past one base in San Francisco. In an Artsy op-ed, she mentioned that “lower than 10 %” of the gallery’s gross sales had been truly carried out in its house in San Francisco. “The information,” she wrote, “just isn’t including up for me or for my artists with respect to sustaining a stationary gallery house.”

It was a raffle, and Norris mentioned it paid off. By way of the offsite program, she has staged exhibits by Carrington and Varo in New York. The Carrington one, held in 2019, ended up in New York Occasions critic Roberta Smith’s record of the highest artwork exhibits of the yr. The Museum of Trendy Artwork purchased a Carrington portray from that present that now hangs within the establishment’s Surrealism gallery.

Because the pandemic, nevertheless, most of Norris’s exhibits have been staged in San Francisco, whether or not on the gallery’s headquarters or elsewhere within the metropolis. She mentioned she is now extra centered on “serving to my artists notice their visions and assembly them the place they’re.”

And a part of that mission has been discovering uncommon types of crossover between her Surrealists and the up to date artists she represents.

Norris mentioned that María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who not too long ago had a Brooklyn Museum survey, joined the gallery within the first place as a result of it had proven work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born Surrealist who made a reputation for herself in Mexico. Campos-Pons’s first present was with Norris’s gallery in 2017; {the catalogue} for her 2023 Brooklyn present ended up that includes a copy of a Varo portray inside its first few pages.

Final yr, Campos-Pons received a MacArthur “genius” award, a second that Norris has continued to rejoice alongside the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of the Carrington portray earlier this yr. “I wish to proceed to be the catalyst for these momentous artwork moments for each one among my artists,” Norris mentioned.