But in 2002, when dealer Wendi Norris visited the British-born artist at her home in Mexico, Carrington was known primarily to Surrealism enthusiasts. One was the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who wrote what is now regarded as the most important book about female Surrealists (now in its second edition); Chadwick recommended that Norris seek out Carrington.

Norris, who was just getting her start as a dealer, followed Chadwick’s tip, expecting to spend just a few hours with the artist. She ended up chatting with Carrington all day—mostly about politics and literature, not art, as was Carrington’s preference. But because Norris did not initially come out of the art world, she brought a perspective to Carrington’s paintings that the artist prized.

“I don’t have an art history background. I have an economics background,” the San Francisco–based dealer told ARTnews, speaking by phone. “She really appreciated my way of viewing her paintings. She knew I was seeing something in a way that wasn’t through a scholarly lens, but in the way most people probably would.”

That first visit was the start of a friendship and business relationship between Norris and Carrington that lasted through the artist’s death in 2011, and continues to this day via her estate. In 2022, Norris’s gallery lent one of the five paintings by Carrington—Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), featuring a lithe figure whose neck sprouts a flowering branch—that featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale. This week, her gallery will spotlight Carrington’s art once more, this time at Art Basel, the world’s most preeminent art fair, where Norris’s dealership is making its Swiss debut.

The booth will feature Portrait of Madame Dupin and other gems by Carrington, including one piece that includes text Carrington wrote backwards, so that it is only legible when a mirror is held to it. (“I think only Carrington and Leonardo da Vinci were able to do that,” Norris conjectured.) Dealers regularly bring older works to Art Basel, but these Carringtons are likely to be some of the most art historically important pieces at the fair this year.

Their presence in Norris’s booth testifies to her commitment to Surrealism, a movement which her gallery has quietly helped rewrite in the past decade. Although Norris’s gallery is not limited to Surrealism specifically, with contemporary artists such as Chitra Ganesh and María Magdalena Campos-Pons on her roster, it is shows for modernists such as Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paahlen, Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo that have defined her programming. Norris has been exhibiting these artists for over a decade, but only recently have they begun appearing regularly in blockbuster exhibitions that reassess Surrealism, often by adding more women and non-European artists to the movement’s canon.

But, Norris said, “I didn’t start out wanting to represent Surrealists.” In fact, she didn’t start out in the art world at all.

While studying economics during the ’90s, she spent time abroad in Madrid, where she was given the option to take one class outside her chosen discipline. She chose to take an art history course, and as part of it, she visited the Prado. “I remember just standing in front of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” she recalled. “I had goosebumps.”

Though she had a strong attachment to art, Norris continued to pursue a business career, graduating in 1996 from Georgetown University with an MBA and soon taking a job as a Paris-based director of strategic planning for the biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb. After that, she worked for several years at Scale Eight, which she recalls as a “really geeky data storage company that was probably ahead of its time.”

Then the dot-com bubble burst, and Norris sought a new direction. “I decided I needed to change what I was doing and do something that I loved, and I just kind of came to it naturally,” Norris said of her transition to the art world. “I had no real idea about the art industry—and it is an industry. Thankfully, I had a business background where I analyzed industries, so I was able to get a sense of it. But it took a while.” She went on to open her eponymous gallery in 2002.

Gallerists are generally not fond of talking publicly about their businesses in percentages and numbers, but Norris credits her business background with making her comfortable with doing just that. In 2017, amid a wave of gallery closures, Norris made the decision to turn her space nomadic, staging shows beyond one base in San Francisco. In an Artsy op-ed, she said that “less than 10 percent” of the gallery’s sales were actually done in its space in San Francisco. “The data,” she wrote, “is not adding up for me or for my artists with respect to maintaining a stationary gallery space.”

It was a gamble, and Norris said it paid off. Through the offsite program, she has staged shows by Carrington and Varo in New York. The Carrington one, held in 2019, ended up in New York Times critic Roberta Smith’s list of the top art shows of the year. The Museum of Modern Art bought a Carrington painting from that show that now hangs in the institution’s Surrealism gallery.

Since the pandemic, however, most of Norris’s shows have been staged in San Francisco, whether at the gallery’s headquarters or elsewhere in the city. She said she is now more focused on “helping my artists realize their visions and meeting them where they are.”

And part of that project has been finding unusual forms of crossover between her Surrealists and the contemporary artists she represents.

Norris said that María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who recently had a Brooklyn Museum survey, joined the gallery in the first place because it had shown work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born Surrealist who made a name for herself in Mexico. Campos-Pons’s first show was with Norris’s gallery in 2017; the catalogue for her 2023 Brooklyn show ended up featuring a reproduction of a Varo painting within its first few pages.

Last year, Campos-Pons won a MacArthur “genius” award, a moment that Norris has continued to celebrate alongside the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of the Carrington painting earlier this year. “I want to continue to be the catalyst for these momentous art moments for each and every one of my artists,” Norris said.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Bin Bin Lady, The Papaya, ca. 2005, composition of four Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photographs.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday.

Today’s show: “María Magdalena Campos-Pons: If I Were A Poet” is on view at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco through Sunday, January 28. The solo exhibition, the artist’s first on the West Coast, presents three installations, large-format Polaroid photographs, and a performance work, all created between 1990 and 2017.

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María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Bin Bin Lady, The Papaya, ca. 2005, composition of four Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photographs.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Classic Creole, 2003, composition of nine Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photographs.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Island Treasures, 2011–12, Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photograph, triptych.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nesting II, 2000, Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photograph, triptych.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nesting IV, 2000, composition of four Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photographs.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, History of a People who were not Heroes: A Town Portrait, 1994, wood, glass, steel, clay tablets, black-and-white photographs, 3-channel video, and stereo sound.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá, 1997, Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photograph, triptych.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Constellation, 2004, composition of 16 Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photographs.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

In the Bay Area a dormant museum scene burst back into life in 2016. The Berkeley Art Museum finally found a new home after the instability of its former building was revealed by the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopened with a controversial addition to their Third Street structure, underwritten by a bequest from the Fisher Foundation so generous and so onerous it made Pandora’s box look benign. Gagosian opened a gallery across the street from the new museum’s entrance, so that people joked if you liked all the new Twomblys and Richters on the museum walls, Gagosian offered a gift shop where you could pick up a pair to take home. In the meantime, locals bemoaned the continuing “rise of the machine”—the tech boom which brought Google and Twitter and Facebook to our city, while raising the rents to astronomical levels and evicting a heap of San Francisco’s working artists. What I remember from the year is a pageant, a series of tableaux vivants on the theme of high contrast.

“Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” the retrospective previously seen at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, opened at SFMOMA in October, and it had us pinching ourselves and saying, “Yes, a major artist lived here, one with a New York imprimatur.”  Conner’s iconoclasm—his disregard of, perhaps a manipulation of, his ideas about the market—inspires us still, and makes us feel guilty at the same time, and these mixed emotions are complicated further by the sheer pleasure and marvel of how many things he excelled at—collage, sculpture, film and video, painting, the silver gelatin photograms of his “Angels” series (1975). Surely the range of this work, we tell ourselves, from the pervy creepiness of “Black Dahlia” to the trance-inducing hypnosis of image in his film Valse Triste (1977) reveals a humanist, a master of emotion as well as of form. Anyway, he’s ours and we deal with him. The SFMOMA also gave us the first museum exhibition of the LA-based street photographer Anthony Hernandez (b. 1947), curated in-house by Erin O’Toole. Hernandez has nearly fifty years of remarkable, exciting work behind him, and the layout of his retrospective was similar to that of Conner’s, with each room unveiling a different body of work. Open through January 1, it is a great crowd-pleaser of a show; you can feel the joy of seeing something totally unexpected translate into a heightened sense of movement; the ballet of moving this close to the extra-large photos, then stepping back far away enough to get the proverbial big picture.

Beyond the museums, Andy and Deborah Rappaport opened the visionary Minnesota Street Project in a once-industrial section of San Francisco. So far as I understand it, the space subsidizes studio rents for a variety of individual artists, as well as galleries, both for-profit and non-. The result, a cementing of the sense that downtown, once the art center of San Francisco, has ceded its control of distribution to a neighborhood known as Dogpatch, after the old Al Capp “Li’l Abner” comics of midcentury. Do clocks ever turn back? In San Francisco they’re not allowed to, but you can sometimes sense a whiff of the old Barbary Coast freshness and raw greed, when everything had yet to be invented, especially social services and reparative justice.

In the margins a handful of foundations—half public, half private—curate the most interesting exhibitions. The Wattis Institute, in a new Mission building, gave us hit after hit. The late Ellen Cantor got her day with “Cinderella Syndrome,” an exhibition of videos and drawings. Her film works, rarely seen in the Bay Area, played to mesmerized audiences at screenings in January and February. Laura Owens came up from LA to turn the Wattis into a wallpaper showroom in which, it was said, ten paintings lived; though I never found one, she seemed to have conquered the somewhat cool and difficult space in a new way. The hat trick continued with senior Bay Area conceptual artist Howard Fried, reviving his “Derelict” series (1974–83) with a gargantuan new Derelict V, a coffee cup so big you could have fit forty people in it, resting on a massive tabletop as sleek as sin. As Alice found when she went underground, there’s no thrill like going into a tiny door into a space where things are bigger than they are in one’s natural life.

Of commercial gallery shows, my favorite was Peter Young’s first show in San Francisco, “Elliptical Paintings.” This was at Gallery Wendi Norris, at the quaint corner of Jessie and Annie Streets downtown. The paintings, from the 1990s, vibrate with festive energy, abstraction shading into a vista of pleasure, control, poetry and magic just like the simple ellipse on which all are based. A Matisse confetti, a Nell Blaine organic vegetative shape, a happy-go-lucky, expressive love of color that’s almost kitschy, like the work of Disney artist Mary Blair—whatever the roots, the pictures dazzle under their own strange sun.

The Bay Area art scene in 2016? Most of us here are, frankly, out of sorts, when not in fact desperate—for an apartment, for a job, for the way out. I think of the young people who just can’t cut it here anymore, who go to cheaper places like New York or Los Angeles. Where did they go, the artists and curators and filmmakers I loved a year ago—Ethan Wang, Patricia Boyd, Mary Helena Clark, Elliott Cost, Jamie Stevens. Josh Minkus? I turn to Joni Mitchell, as ever; on “Court and Spark” she told us that “Everything comes and goes,” but how much attrition can one town take? A few weeks ago, a tragic Oakland warehouse fire took away dozens more of our starriest and sweetest, and I have to figure out how to turn things around so that youth stands a chance in these days of precarity.

Wolfgang Paalen, Messengers des trois pôles (Messengers from Three Poles), 1949.

COURTESY GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

Paintings from the 1930s included Combat des Princes Saturniens III (1939), a biomorphic abstraction created by means of fumage, the technique of using candle smoke to start off a composition. These early experiments, rooted in European Surrealism, gave way in the 1940s to such innovative works as Nuit tropicale (1948), in which birdlike figures dissolve almost completely into luminous mosaics of jewel-toned marks.

The centerpiece of the exhibition was Les Cosmogenes (1944). At eight feet high, the largest painting Paalen ever created, this multilayered abstraction combines elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Mexican muralism with Paalen’s visualizations of subatomic forces. In it, simultaneously exploding and coalescing rectilinear forms are overlaid with turquoise and emerald arcs and vortices that recall Paul Klee’s dashed brushstrokes. Recognizable objects and shapes nearly disappear into the overall composition of vectors and energetic spirals, stretching the bounds of pictorial logic. Here could be seen the tension between the painting as representation and the painting as object so influential to the New York Abstract Expressionists who took inspiration from Paalen’s art and ideas.

Throughout the exhibition were works that fused a sense of wonder with an interest in scientific theories of reality. The best of them still dazzled with formal mastery underpinned by a restless intellectual drive.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 105.