The artist Françoise Gilot (1921–2023) repeatedly advised against retrospective thinking, particularly if that exercise results in pangs of regret. Such proclamations should typically be met with skepticism: it is difficult to imagine an eye that never turns, a mind that never roams.

Newly separated from an Italian prince, the American-born painter-poet Kay Sage (1898–1963) snuck into the studio of the surrealist Kurt Seligmann—enticed by a stack of paintings visible from the hallway of the Hotel Grosvenor in Paris. Later that summer, at Seligmann’s urging, she visited Galerie Charpentier and saw a painting titled Je vous attends (I am waiting for you) (1934)—the first she would glimpse of her future husband, Yves Tanguy (1900–55). The chance encounter proved transformative: already a student of landscape painting, she resolved to move to Paris from Italy and earn her place among the ranks of the Surrealists. In 1938, the seemingly predestined couple met and remained constant companions until Tanguy’s death in 1955.

The works on view in this exhibition show us Pousette-Dart’s sustained attempt to think of and represent the self relationally, as part of a cosmological totality that encompasses vaguely defined architectures, alien bodies, symbolic constellations, and energy fields.