A Present for the Past

Gordon Onslow Ford is a British-born painter associated with Surrealism who later developed a distinct vocabulary of cosmic and automatic abstraction. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on canvas, his paintings feature biomorphic forms, dot clusters, and luminous fields that suggest microscopic and astronomical scales simultaneously. A participant in André Breton's circle in late 1930s Paris, he later settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where his practice shifted toward meditative, nature-inflected abstraction. His work is held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.