Alice Rahon

(Chenecey-Buillon, France, 1904 - Mexico City, Mexico 1987)

Alice Rahon was a French-born Mexican poet and painter associated with the Surrealist diasporic movement. In 1941, she moved to Mexico City with her then husband Wolfgang Paalen and Swiss photographer Eva Sulzer.

After publishing three volumes of poetry illustrated by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró and Paalen, she shifted her practice to the visual arts and spent her mature years working almost exclusively as a painter. Like her poetry, Rahon’s paintings are thick with mythology, magic, memory, and language. Compelled by both prehistoric cave paintings and the Surrealist milieu in which she lived with her close friends Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, Rahon wove symbols, colors, and textures together in delicate combinations of figuration and abstraction.

Rahon’s work uniquely melded European Surrealist influences with the cultural vibrancy of popular and ancestral cultures in Mexico. Today her contributions to both visual art and poetry continue to be re-examined.

Rahon died in Mexico City in 1987.