Opening Reception for Marie Wilson | A Poet of Forms and Colors
Date and Time
- Tuesday, Jan 20, 2026 11am - 6pm
Location
Gallery Wendi Norris
436 Jackson St
Details
Gallery Wendi Norris is proud to present Marie Wilson: A Poet of Forms and Colors, the artist's debut with the gallery and first major solo exhibition in San Francisco since 1984, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti presented Apparitions: The Mythical World of Marie Wilson at City Lights Bookstore.
The exhibition 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.
🗓️ January 20 | 11 AM-6 PM
đź“Ť Gallery Wendi Norris | 436 Jackson St
About Marie Wilson
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.
Upbringing in California
Marie Wilson was born in 1922 in Cedarville, CA. “I think I was born an artist,” she once said. As a child, she developed a fascination with Native American imagery from her grandfather’s collection of handcrafted Indigenous American artifacts. She received a scholarship to Mills College, Oakland, earning her BFA in 1944, and completed her MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1948. After graduating she remained in the Bay Area to teach art, including at the Oakland Public Museum.
Her introduction to the avant-garde came around 1950 through encounters in Sausalito, CA, with the Greek artist Jean Varda (whom she described as her mentor) and British surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford. These connections immersed her in the intellectual community surrounding the Dynaton movement, founded by Austrian surrealist and theorist Wolfgang Paalen, American artist Lee Mullican, and Onslow Ford.