The Dynaton

The Dynaton
Curated by Laura Whitcomb

Spring 2026
Château Shatto
Los Angeles, California

Château Shatto, in active collaboration with the Lucid Art Foundation, presents an exhibition, Dynaton, that revisits and expands the artistic constellation set in motion by Wolfgang Paalen’s “Farewell to Surrealism” and crystallized in the 1951 San Francisco Museum of Art presentation of Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, Lee Mullican, and the philosophical writings of Jacqueline Johnson.

Curated by Laura Whitcomb, and drawing on the scholarship and archives from the Lucid Art Foundation, the exhibition marks the first substantial museum-scale presentation of Dynaton in nearly thirty-five years. The ephemera room—featuring literature, photographs and notes—highlights Dynaton’s intent in relating art as epistemology.

Taking its name from the Aristotelian to dynaton—“the possible”—Dynaton staged a decisive refusal of labels. Like Dada before it, it declined the nomenclature of a “movement” even as it quietly rewrote the terms of postwar abstraction. Rather than treating California as a provincial outpost, Dynaton approached it as a laboratory where Indigenous cosmologies, quantum physics, Jungian psychology, and extraterrestrial imaginaries could cohabit the same pictorial field.

First articulated in 1951 and revisited only intermittently in subsequent decades, Dynaton has nonetheless remained one of the most consequential and under-recognized chapters of West Coast art history. Founded by two key figures of the first and second generations of Surrealism, Paalen and Onslow Ford, Dynaton offered an advanced philosophical alignment with science and metaphysics that broke from André Breton’s direction, particularly his emphases on exploring the unconscious through dreams and his affiliation with a political movement.

The exhibition also brings into focus artists within the orbit of Dynaton including Luchita Hurtado, Harry Partch, Alice Rahon and others. Taken together, these works frame Dynaton not as a closed historical episode but as an expanded field whose terms feel newly prescient—and prophetic in our current moment.