A current report by ArtTactic with Sotheby’s discovered that in 2024, Surrealism achieved annual development of 8.8 %, with public sale gross sales rising to $439.7 million—a soar of 131.6 % from 2018—whereas the style’s share of the worldwide artwork market elevated from 2.4 % to 9.2 % in the identical interval. Main the market are ladies Surrealists, who proceed to succeed in new highs, as most not too long ago demonstrated when Dorothea Tanning’s Inside with Sudden Pleasure fetched $3.2 million at Sotheby’s this November, whereas Remedios Varo’s Sans titre from 1943 approached the million mark after charges, touchdown at $952,500 (est. $500,000-700,000). Her present report was set simply final Could at Christie’s, with Revelación promoting for $6.22 million. Nevertheless, Leonora Carrington is a very placing instance, with costs hovering, particularly since Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale fueled her rediscovery, reaching a brand new excessive when Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) offered for $28.5 million final yr, setting a brand new benchmark for each the artist and the Surrealist market.
But few know the total story behind their market and institutional reassessment—or, extra exactly, the important thing participant who believed early on that the symbolic density of their work and its mystical storytelling had one thing pressing to say to our time. That individual is San Francisco gallerist Wendi Norris, who first confirmed and championed their work properly earlier than the broader artwork world turned its consideration their method. Notably, it was in her 2019 pop-up “The Story of the Final Egg,” a four-decade survey of Carrington’s cosmic work and sculptural masks on Madison Avenue, that Cecilia Alemani first encountered Carrington’s writings and the depth of her symbolic universe, which later impressed her 2022 Venice Biennale, The Milk of Desires.
Forward of the opening of Artwork Basel Miami Seaside, Observer caught up with Norris to study extra about her life-changing decisions, magical encounters and the sharp instinct that led her to find and champion these artists, in addition to her exact, data-driven technique that actively anticipates new fashions in a fast-changing artwork world.
Earlier than opening her gallery in 2002, Norris had a profitable profession within the tech business. She labored in administration consulting in a variety of tech-centered corporations earlier than shifting to San Francisco, the place she targeted completely on startups. With an MBA and company expertise in Fortune 50 environments, she felt well-equipped to construct and launch corporations, which she did efficiently for a number of years.
Her final tech enterprise was an organization pioneering refined cloud-storage applied sciences lengthy earlier than “the cloud” entered the mainstream. Norris was the vp of selling, accountable for the messaging and positioning of a posh system, primarily creating an business section that didn’t but exist. “I all the time felt that my job in tech was being a translator, taking these concepts of those good, extremely scientific founders and determining the best way to make broad audiences care about what they had been constructing,” she tells Observer. “Working with minds like that, you’re consistently translating sophisticated concepts into human language. Truthfully, that’s not so completely different from what I do with artists right this moment: turning complicated concepts into accessible narratives.”
But Norris recollects that even on the day her firm appeared on The Wall Avenue Journal’s entrance web page, she ended up studying the adjoining artwork article first. “The launch of my firm was within the A-1 column. It ought to have been a PR dream. However the center column was a evaluation of an artwork exhibition. I learn the artwork story earlier than I learn the one about my very own firm. That ought to have instructed me one thing,” she displays.
Then the corporate collapsed through the dot-com disaster in what was an eye-opening second. “I had 40 individuals working for me, however when all the pieces fell aside, I spotted I used to be working insane hours, I used to be in my 30s and I wasn’t obsessed with it.”
Norris left and commenced touring, circling the world with a backpack, visiting Asia and Central America. She had been in Cuba for an prolonged interval—illegally then—when she determined she wished to have a gallery. “I wished to comply with my ardour. I used to be extremely moved by the individuals I met there: poets, musicians, artists. That was the turning level.”
Norris had no actual understanding of the artwork business on the time. She was an artwork collector, albeit on a small scale, and she or he’d had a very detrimental early expertise. “I used to be attempting to make what, for me at 33, was a serious buy—perhaps $20,000, which is like $50,000 right this moment—and galleries in New York actually wouldn’t discuss to me. I used to be prepared to purchase, and the rudeness and inaccessibility had been off-putting.”
Having grown up within the Midwest with restricted publicity to museums and having taken solely a single artwork historical past class (in Spanish, whereas finding out overseas), Norris traces her earliest connection to artwork again to a transformative encounter with Las Meninas on the Prado: “I had a profound expertise in entrance of Las Meninas. Goosebumps. That sense of what nice artwork can do, the way it reminds you what it’s to be human, caught with me.”
Decided to construct a distinct sort of house, she wrote a marketing strategy, full with Venn diagrams and market analyses, however at its core, her purpose was easy: to point out artwork she liked and to make it accessible. From the beginning, Norris constructed her gallery round human relationships and group, bringing in many individuals from the tech business she knew, whom different galleries had failed to have interaction.
Lots of her earliest tech purchasers, together with senior Google executives, had been individuals one would by no means determine on sight; they valued privateness however anticipated readability and transparency when buying something, together with artwork. “My background helped. I’d raised enterprise capital, I’d had profitable exits, so I might communicate their language when wanted,” she explains.
She initially partnered with somebody meant to convey curatorial experience whereas she dealt with operations and gross sales. Nevertheless, because the gallery started working with Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning, she realized that secondary-market work required a distinct ability set—authorized contracts, title transfers and complicated personal negotiations. “For me, that enterprise facet wasn’t intimidating. I’d been promoting million-dollar software program techniques. Promoting million-dollar artworks didn’t scare me. The content material did, at first, however not the numbers.”
Stepping again, Norris recollects that the primary present she ever organized completely on her personal got here earlier than the gallery formally opened. It featured two artist mates, Kate Eric, a collaborative duo. “I did the present of their studio and offered the entire thing out on opening night time. The primary work I ever offered went to somebody from my tech life. I bear in mind considering, ‘Okay, I can do that.’” That early success gave her confidence that she might, the truth is, run a gallery. Norris would ultimately promote round 250 of their works and information them by way of a solo exhibition on the Aldrich Museum however then witness their skilled partnership and careers dissolve when the artists divorced shortly afterward, a reminder of how fragile even probably the most promising inventive trajectories may be.
The gallery’s early programming mirrored her early companion’s preferences, whereas Norris targeted totally on the enterprise facet. The primary exhibition she curated herself—which combined Twentieth- and Twenty first-century artists and paired Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington with residing artists she felt would broaden the dialog—acquired a sharply detrimental evaluation from critic Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her first devoted Carrington exhibition wouldn’t occur till 2007, however Norris had already begun buying works by Carrington, Tanning and Varo roughly 20 years earlier, lengthy earlier than they achieved the visibility they’ve right this moment.
Whitney Chadwick, whose guide “Girls Artists and the Surrealist Motion” pioneered scholarship in a area now on the heart of each institutional and market consideration, launched Norris to Carrington’s work. “It’s nonetheless the inspiration for all the pieces. Whitney occurred to be based mostly in San Francisco then, so she and I met often. She and Leonora had been extremely shut, and she or he walked me by way of the entire historical past and context. She grew to become my actual mentor.”
Susan Aberth, a number one lively scholar on Carrington, additionally inspired her to satisfy the artist. “She didn’t have gallery illustration, and so they warned me that she didn’t like most individuals and didn’t endure fools,” Norris says. “‘Simply be your self,’ they stated, ‘and produce items—good drawing paper, pulpy thriller novels, and correct English tea.’”
So Norris flew to Mexico. “It was about 22 years in the past, once I was pregnant with my first youngster, which is how I bear in mind the timing. I confirmed up with my canine, my items, and never a lot of a plan,” she recollects. “She favored me immediately. She liked the identify Wendy, straight from Peter Pan. And he or she adored animals. She had a magnet of her favourite cat, Monsieur, on her fridge. I confirmed her an image of my cat, Toro, and so they seemed an identical. She determined Toro was Monsieur reincarnated, and we had been off.”
The 2 fell into an countless, free-ranging dialog: politics, the Catholic Church, Mexico’s entrenched patriarchy, even overpopulation. After hours of tea and discuss, Carrington walked her out to a cab and launched her to a longtime pal and legal professional, who would later develop into an vital determine in her personal life. “That day was the beginning of seven years of visits and lengthy telephone calls,” Norris recollects. “I used to be a younger mother with two infants, so I couldn’t all the time journey as a lot as I want I had, wanting again. However sure, in our personal method, we adopted one another. It was a magical bond.”
Norris notes that when individuals focus solely on the haunting and stratified symbolism of Carrington’s work, they typically overlook the truth that she was extremely humorous—she possessed a depraved humorousness, which Norris views as an indication of nice mind. “It takes a substantial period of time to grasp Leonora’s world actually. I’m nonetheless studying; each time I take a look at one among her work, I see one thing new, one other layer of symbology.”
Norris instantly understood and appreciated Carrington’s and different artists’ means to weave symbolic tales and translate their highly effective imaginary universes into steady storytelling—world-building by way of each visible and written language.
In a earlier interview with Artwork Basel, Norris described her program as “textual,” “poetic” and “narrative-driven.” One of many threads she returns to is that a lot of her artists have a robust literary underpinning. “It’s not all the time narrative, precisely, however there’s a deep engagement with the written phrase,” she explains. “Carrington, Tanning, Rahon, Varo—they had been all distinctive writers and poets. Amongst my up to date artists, Chitra is a rare author, María Magdalena Campos-Pons is an excellent narrator, and Enrique Martínez Celaya has revealed numerous books.”
Norris has an affinity for artists who interact with fantasy, working inside mystical and religious dimensions and drawing on archetypal and ancestral symbologies shared throughout time and place. Certainly, she readily acknowledges that she has all the time been drawn to pagan rituals and completely different cosmologies, and thru her artists, she discovered extra. “I grew up round a haunted home, I consider in ghosts, and I’d already had a ghost encounter once I lived in Paris working in tech,” she says, recalling how Carrington liked that story and wished to listen to it repeatedly. “I’ve all the time believed in different spirit worlds, so I understood what she was attuned to. That connection was actual. I feel that’s a part of why I responded so sincerely to her work, to Remedios, and to the others.”
But Norris additionally believes that her energetic humanistic curiosity helped the artwork world make sense. “I can’t consider many professions the place your studying curve by no means plateaus,” she says. “The quantity I’ve discovered from my artists, from collectors, from museum curators—a lot of whom are actually very shut mates—is extraordinary. I’m a sponge, and the artwork world feeds that endlessly. That’s not the case in most professions.”
For a similar motive, Norris works to remain attuned to shifts within the business, typically anticipating traits lengthy earlier than they crystallize. At the moment, because the artwork world broadly reckons with the truth that the standard gallery mannequin now not suits the tempo, scale and globalized dynamics of the market or the altering habits of a brand new era of collectors, her earlier pivots really feel prescient.
In 2017, Norris, who describes herself as a knowledge junkie, seemed on the numbers and realized that lower than 10 % of her gross sales got here from the gallery’s 6,000-square-foot house in downtown San Francisco. The figures made the choice clear: she reimagined the brick-and-mortar mannequin completely, moved her headquarters right into a smaller footprint house and embraced a nomadic, decentralized technique, staging exhibitions in vacant industrial areas all over the world. Her 2017 shift to off-site tasks ultimately paved the way in which for the most important Carrington present and, finally, the Venice Biennale second.
Whereas a lot of her market is centered in New York, Norris says she doesn’t really feel the necessity to keep a everlasting house there; California is house, and she or he prefers to steadiness each worlds. “I’m an innovator. From how I run a enterprise to how I compensate my group and run my life, I’ve all the time tried to overlook all the pieces I do know and ask: what’s the purest model of what I truly wish to do?”
Norris’s mannequin is now deeply artist-driven, grounded in being strategic and intentional with reveals and festivals so she will go the place her artists’ markets and audiences are and the place she is aware of their work can be well-received and celebrated. “We strategy every artist strategically, one after the other,” she asserts. Relating to festivals, she deliberately selects solely two or three a yr, bringing extremely curated displays conceived explicitly for that context quite than what she jokingly describes because the ‘charcuterie board’ strategy widespread amongst galleries.
Waiting for Miami, she stated that what excited her wasn’t the conference heart or the scene however the alternative to introduce Enrique Martínez Celaya’s work to the individuals who want to face in entrance of it. Guests may arrive asking for the Carrington drawings however keep for Martínez Celaya, and this type of direct encounter with work is what makes the truthful worthwhile. “I need the individuals who have to know his work—establishments, high collectors—to face in entrance of these work and really feel what I really feel. They don’t translate digitally. It’s important to be there bodily. That’s the joys.”
Her key precedence stays having the ability to make a generative distinction in an artist’s legacy or profession. “My strategy with our artists is extremely holistic, nearly old-fashioned. We publish, we’re consistently organizing, lending to museums, and fascinated by commissions,” she explains. “Nearly all of what we do isn’t gross sales. We’re taking a look at our artists from each angle: what they’re publishing, the place they need to be seen, the best way to help them strategically.”
This strategy has pushed the revaluation of Carrington, Varo, Tanning and different artists Norris has championed for a minimum of twenty years. She laughs on the reminiscence of how various things had been when she began: “After I met Leonora 22 years in the past, her work didn’t promote a lot. The identical goes for Dorothea Tanning—I might purchase a Tanning for subsequent to nothing till a couple of years in the past. And now take a look at the place we’re.”
Norris recollects the second she realized how dramatically the dialog had expanded. “After Cecilia and I first talked about utilizing The Milk of Desires, and she or he requested whether or not I might safe the copyright, I knew issues had been shifting. Out of the blue our little microcosm of a gallery in San Francisco was a part of a worldwide dialog.” Norris had additionally been Simone Leigh’s vendor for fairly some time, who that yr would characterize the U.S., and she or he had six of her fifteen artists within the biennale—a transparent signal that one thing in her imaginative and prescient was proper.
When requested why audiences appear newly receptive to the symbolic, mythic and esoteric worlds her artists discover, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s 2025. The tempo of technological change, political chaos, the anxiousness round A.I.—individuals can’t even articulate what’s occurring,” she displays. “Whether or not you’re in Delhi, Mexico Metropolis, Doha or San Francisco, we’re all grappling with the identical human-condition considerations. And my artists have been forward of the curve for many years. Carrington and Varo noticed all of this coming. So did Wolfgang Paalen. So does Chitra Ganesh right this moment. The world is lastly catching up.”
As we wrap up, Norris pauses, considering. “There’s a Czech priest who stated the most important downside of our time isn’t left and proper however floor and depth,” she says. “That’s been on my thoughts. Depth is what connects individuals. And the artists I work with have that depth.”
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