Paulina Peavy exhbition: Works 1930s - 1980s

Emanuela Campoli is pleased to announce Paulina Peavy’s first exhibition with the gallery. Curated by Vera Alemani, the exhibition marks the first retrospective of Peavy’s work in Paris—a city of particular significance in the history of surrealism and the intersection of art and spiritualism —highlighting her role as a pioneering figure in these histories.

Paulina Peavy (1901–1999) was an American artist, inventor, philosopher, and spiritualist whose visionary work intertwined art, metaphysics, mysticism, science, and gender. Born in what is now called Old Colorado City, Colorado, she earned a degree in vocational education from Oregon State College in 1923 and later studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles with Hans Hofman. In 1932, during a séance in Santa Ana, California, she claimed to have encountered a spirit named Lacamo, whom she described as a UFO or "Unidentified Foreign Object". This entity became her lifelong muse, guiding all her artistic practice. Throughout her career, she exhibited in prominent venues, including the Golden Gate International Exposition and in various galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco andlater New York, where she moved in 1942.

Presented in the show are Peavy’s paintings and drawings spanning from the 1930s to her final works from the 1980s, including rare pieces from the Golden Gate International Exposition, along with films, archival materials, poetry, and masks, which reflect the depth of the artist’s continuous experimentation.

In the early 1930s, Lacamo instructed her to reinterpret biblical texts by removing capitalized words and translating them into scientific terms such as "biology" and "embryology," transforming the scriptures into a document of "pure scientific reality". This approach was part of Peavy's broader effort to reclaim and reframe religious narratives, which she believed had been distorted by patriarchal interpretations and to advocate for a predominant role of women in history —adopting spiritualism as a platform for feminism. Her Golden Gate International Exposition paintings incorporated biblical themes, presenting figures and stories as archetypes of higher meaning. I am Alpha and Omega (c. 1937-1970s) and Blessed are the Meek (c.1937-1970s) titled after biblical passages, presents her as a “parabolic painter”, a term that refers to the exploration of Biblical parables as much as the geometric configurations charged with magical properties and used to signify the unseen[1].

Her layered painting technique was inherently slow, on one hand because of the intellectual processing required to absorb the increasingly complex ideas Lacamo imparted to her, but also because of the nature of her method, which involved creating meticulous, enamel-like surfaces in oil. She has consistently used what she described as a veiling technique, an application of translucent and luminous layers that allowed her to depict different auric fields and etheric bands and waves associated with the eternal.

Progressively obscuring the imagery of earlier figures, crystal forms and the concept of crystallization became essential to Peavy’s later oil paintings. Her abstract formations of pyramidal and other polyhedral shapes were for their conductivity – their ability to connect the viewer with Lacamo’s messages and for the sacred nature of their geometry. The works, often spanning several years, indicate Peavy's unique use of layering over time and the passage from figuration to abstraction. For Peavy, who didn’t title or date most of her works, these paintings were ongoing revelations, and many are the result of 50 years of experimentation.

Peavy regarded androgyny as the most elevated state of human existence and placed particular importance on the generative power of women. In her Phantasma series of works, which were followed by her last known film, Phantasma: Sixty Oil Paintings, A Series, A Self Portrait (1988), she presented the ovum within aural, concentric color fields, focusing on the inception and genesis of the seed of life and capturing the “eternal feminine”, a life-giving force.

Following her encounter with Lacamo, Peavy began wearing handmade masks during painting sessions to facilitate deeper trance states; designed to alter consciousness, they functioned as conduit for Lacamo's messages. Surrealist objects inspired by indigenous traditions, crafted from materials like leather, velvet, and lace, and adorned with beads, feathers, buttons, and costume jewelry, each mask was unique and bore titles such as 28 Ivory Tower, 82 Modern Art , Duo Genius or 86 Le Braque. Her commitment to this practice extended beyond the studio; she wore these masks during public appearances, including interviews on the Long John Nebel radio show in the late 1950s, where she remained in trance while Lacamo spoke through her. The intelligence speaking through Paulina Peavy said: '… we are using her exactly as you use your microphone. We are beings existing in a world of too high frequency for your comprehension.'

Peavy’s work was shown at SFMOMA in 1935, LACMA in 1936 and the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939. Since her rediscovery in 2014, exhibitions include An Etherian Channeler (Beyond Baroque, 2021), Astrocultural Messenger (Andrew Edlin Gallery, 2023), Greater New York (MoMA PS1, 2021), and Supernatural America (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2022). A monograph by Laura Whitcomb was published in 2023.

Paulina Peavy’s work is held in the collections of SFMOMA, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., LACMA, the Portland Museum of Art (Maine), and Oregon State University.

[1] Whitcomb, Laura, Etherian Channeller, Andrew Edlin Gallery, 2023, p. 42