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 Dynaton, curated by Laura Whitcomb, an exhibition that revisits and expands the constellation set in motion by Wolfgang Paalen’s ‘Farewell to Surrealism’ and crystallized in the 1951 San Francisco Museum of Art presentation of artists Gordon Onslow Ford, Paalen, Lee Mullican, and writer Jacqueline Johnson. The exhibition reunites many of the original paintings from the 1951 show and returns them, as closely as possible, to their historic placements in the gallery. In doing so, it treats California not as a peripheral outpost but as a generative center where Indigenous cosmologies, quantum physics, Jungian psychology, and extraterrestrial imaginaries coexist in the same pictorial field. Their work, thought, and labour accompany a renewed examination of Dynaton’s legacy with a reimagining of the 1951 Ancestor Room, where newly theorized quantum territories resonate with ancestral lineages. The exhibition also brings into clearer view a wider circle of women in this milieu—Alice Rahon, Eva Sulzer, Luchita Hurtado, Jeanne Reynal, among others—whose practices and relationships with the group help complicate and extend its history.