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Wolfgang Robert Paalen (July 22, 1905 in Vienna, Austria – September 24, 1959 in Taxco, Mexico) was an Austrian-Mexican painter who, after a short commitment to the Abstraction Création group joined the French Surrealists in 1935. He soon became famous for his paintings with candle-smoke (fumage technique) and his portentous combinative objects. During his exile in Mexico after 1939, where he organized the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1940 in collaboration with César Moro, he founded the critical journal DYN. Trying to reconcile the divergent materialist and mystical metaphysical tendencies of Breton´s modes of thought (mindsets?) with a philosophy of contingency, he challenged a reshaping (conversion?) of Surrealism from within. After a conciliatory sojourn with Breton and the Surrealists in Paris from 1951 to 1954, he returned to Mexico where he committed suicide in 1959. undefined