Alan Glass (Montreal, 1932 – Mexico City, 2023) was a Canadian artist who began his art studies in his hometown before moving to Paris in 1952, where he connected with the surrealist movement. A sugar skull, a traditional sweet from the Day of the Dead, sparked his fascination with Mexico and marked a turning point in his life and work. In 1961, he traveled to Mexico and eventually settled permanently in Mexico City.
Mexican material culture had a decisive influence on his work, especially in the creation of his surrealist objects from found elements. In his compositions, Glass juxtaposes and encapsulates everyday objects —such as buttons, human hair, insects, or matchsticks— transforming them into pieces where the fragmented and the impossible coexist in surprising ways, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.
This introductory room presents a diverse selection of his artistic production, ranging from automatist drawings created in Paris —many of them never exhibited before— as well as a rich representation of his most iconic surrealist objects. These works reflect the artist’s personal experiences and include allusions to key figures with whom Glass interacted, blending personal and cultural elements into compositions that transcend the tangible. Together, this section offers a fragmented and multidimensional portrait, providing an intimate glimpse into the artist’s creative process.
Far from offering a chronological reading, Alan Glass. Chance Find presents an in-depth review of more than six decades of artistic production, structured around thematic constellations that unravel the artist’s recurring themes, such as nature, desire, travel, the sacred, and death.
Alan Glass was one of the foremost makers of surrealist objects from the 1960s to present times. Surrealist objects were originally made by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, and Joseph Cornell from the 1920s onward. These works often sabotaged the intended functions of ordinary things, either by modifying them or by combining them with other items. Like the earlier artists, Glass constructed his objects and boxes from material found in flea markets and dime stores. He was constantly alert to the next sorprendente hallazgo during his extensive travels as well as in daily life in Mexico City. Glass’s three-dimensional art ranges from modified found objects to the often majestic boxed assemblages for which he is best-known. His boxes are highly personal constellations of affinities and memories. Glass pieced together references to artists dear to him with paraphernalia from times past and places both near and far. The flight of bees, the latent eroticism in 19th-century paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, and headless ravens point the way to a deeply felt poetry, at one and the same time mysterious and immediate.
When he assembled his boxes, Alan Glass used intuition and poetic associations. Placed in the right way, an old saw can turn into a moonlit landscape. Found materials, ranging from old advertisements and firecrackers to clocks and seashells, come together to form new visions of the world. This is the meaning of zurcidos invisibles: to stitch together objects and images that are otherwise kept apart. Glass was committed to mending the world by revealing its hidden meaning and to discover new territories beyond waking reason. Many of his objects and boxes present maps and other aids to help us navigate the world in new ways, attentive to the messages of dreams and the unconscious. A sailboat transports us to an oneiric south sea and lighthouses beckon to the unknown terrain of the marvelous. In a more nightmarish way, Glass’s boxes may also depict the chilling underworld of ice castles from his birthplace Montréal. In several works, the artist explored the mystery of death, from the mortuary rituals of ancient Egypt to the Mexican treatment of death as a sweet treat. Some of his reliquary-like boxes are metaphysical maps, intended as guidelines toward rebirth, or even resurrection. In Glass’s objects, matter turns into spirit.
Like an artist’s studio, a garden is a place of growth and new life, combining uninhibited creativity with disciplined rigor. Many of Alan Glass’s paintings evoke a living nature full of mysteries, including intruding spirits of both humans and other animals. With painstaking precision, he painted smoke-like apparitions occupying both forests and the heavens. Glowing scarabs and mysterious temples emerge in the luminous night. A scroll paper made of animal skin is overcrowded with ghostly beings. Overlooking this garden is the goddess, a recurring figure in Glass’s art. Like his close friend Leonora Carrington, Glass dreamed of a matriarchal past, and he often depicted pagan goddesses closely related to bees and honey. These protective and nourishing figures live in domains of verdant growth. They are also related to Glass’s obsession with eggs – painted and mounted in boxes, eggs turn into potent symbols of creativity and fertility, sacred vessels displaying the ghostly dance of life. Glass’s garden forms a veritable ecology of plants, spirits, and birds, overlooked by the goddess.
