These days, it is hard to imagine a time when everyone wasn’t talking about Leonora Carrington’s art. In 2022, the Surrealist artist’s writings lent the Venice Biennale its name. Earlier this year, a painting by her sold for $28.5 million at Sotheby’s following a 10-minute bidding war, setting a new auction record for the artist. Next year, a vast survey of her art will be staged in Italy.
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.
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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.