Gordon Wagner (1915-1987) American, Mixed Media Surrealist Painting. Signed and dated '73 bottom right. 

Overall: 17 X 13 1/4 in. 

Sight: 13 1/4 X 9 1/2 in. 

#3869 . 

Gordon Parsons Wagner was born on April 13th, 1915 in Redondo Beach, California. He became an orphan at the age of twelve, and worked at arcades around the beach to raise enough money to attend college. These experiences had a profound impact on his artistic sensibilities, as well as his desire to combine multiple mediums for maximum impact. In his late teens he was heavily influenced by his mentor and fellow painter Norman S. Chamberlain, with whom he traveled to France and met renowned artists like Pablo Picasso and Maurice de Vlaminck. His interest in art was bolstered by exposure to the surrealists, particularly Dali and Max Ernst. He came to prefer their mysticism and fantastical elements over the works of the cubists he first emulated. Returning to the United States, he studied engineering at UCLA starting in 1935, before transferring to the Chouinard Art Institute in 1937. He eventually returned to UCLA to finish his degree in 1941, and went to work as a tool and design engineer for the EMSCO Derrick Equipment Company. He found it difficult to stay at any one job for long, quickly moving to work as a mechanical engineer for Hughes Aircraft and Rocketdyne, all while experimenting with sculpture. Wagner became one of the earliest pioneers of the California Assemblage movement, combining debris from beaches, city streets, and forests into artistic tableaus. He traveled extensively as well, primarily to Arizona and Mexico, where his fascination with Native American mythology and legends and with the presentational forms of fetishes and icons had a profound effect on his early paintings and later assemblages. By 1950 he was exhibiting at Willard Houghland and Gray­wood Galleries in Los Angeles, with his first solo show in 1956 at the Now Gallery. In 1958 he became an art instructor at Barnsdall Art Center, where he taught classes for the next ten years. In 1966 Wagner joined artists Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell as a participant in their exhibition 66 Signs of Neon, conceived as a collaborative project in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion against the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. The project made national headlines and catapulted him into the limelight. In subsequent years Wagner moved from making free-form junk sculptures to placing found objects in cases under glass. After trav­eling in Europe, notably in Sweden, Holland, and Belgium, where his work was regularly shown, he began producing narrative box constructions using fabricated objects and painted backdrops in which odd juxtapositions and distortions recall the work of surrealist painter René Magritte. Wagner returned to junk sculpture in the mid-1980s, by which time he had won 75 awards and had work in over 500 collections and museums around the world. He died on December 4th, 1987 in Los Angeles. His mechanical designs, as well as his paintings, poetry, ephemera, and assemblage creations are still highly sought after by collectors.