Leonora Carrington was a British-born, Mexico-based painter and writer whose work sits at the intersection of Surrealism, mythology, occultism, alchemy, and feminist imagination. Born in Lancashire in 1917, she studied art in London before entering the Surrealist circles of Paris, where she began a relationship with the German artist Max Ernst.
The Second World War ruptured this period of her life. After Ernst was imprisoned, Carrington fled France for Spain, where she experienced a severe psychological crisis. Her family had her confined against her will to a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, an experience she later transformed into the autobiographical work Down Below. She eventually left Europe and settled in Mexico City, where she would spend most of the rest of her life.
In Mexico, Carrington developed a distinct symbolic language populated by hybrid animals, witches, goddesses, spectral figures, and ritual gatherings. Her work draws from Celtic folklore, alchemy, occult traditions, ancient Mexican cultures, and alternative forms of knowledge. The human and animal, domestic and cosmic, rational and magical continually pass into one another.
Her writing extends the same strange cosmology into language. In works such as The Hearing Trumpet and Down Below, reality becomes porous, absurd, and unstable. Carrington’s Surrealism is less an escape from the world than a refusal of its fixed categories, especially those imposed on women, reason, nature, and the imagination.
See also: Remedios Varo, Vladimir Kush
Images from Mutual Art, MoMA, Sotheby's, and The Collector.
