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Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington OBE (1917-2011) was a surrealist painter, sculptor and a novelist of British descent, who lived the majority of her life in Mexico. Credited with being a pioneer feminist artist of the Surrealist movement, Carrington’s work is centred around the supernatural, the occult, nature and oftentimes autobiographical references. Following her art studies in London, she relocated to France to be with Max Ernst. She got acquainted with the Surrealist circle and in the year 1937 she produced her first painting and the following year her first sculpture, both works depicting horses which was a favourite subject of hers.

In 1938 Carrington participated in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, a Surrealism exhibition in Amsterdam. In 1943, she was among the thirty-one artists selected for the 'Exhibition by 31 Women' at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in New York. Despite her close ties with the Surrealist movement, she refrained from perceiving herself as a Surrealist artist or as a member of the movement, fiercely advocating that women should have the space to carve their own trajectory than being instead muses to male artists. She maintained a strong feminist position throughout her life and career and as such she only recently has started being recognised for her contribution in the fight for women’s rights.

Carrington moved to the Americas in 1941 to avoid the war in Europe and eventually settled in Mexico City where she lived for the rest of her life. She found inspiration in art, nature and literature, from Hieronymus Bosch to Beatrix Potter and the writings of the ancient Mayan people. Her body of work, largely under-researched, began being studied in Europe in the recent decades with the first retrospective in the UK organised by the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1991, and curator Cecilia Alemani framed the 59th Venice Biennale around the artist, borrowing the title of one of her books, The Milk of Dreams, for the exhibition.

Her works are held in numerous public and private collections around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, US; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, US; Tate, London, UK; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, US; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, US; the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, US; the Museo Pape, Monclova, Mexico; and the Maison André Breton, Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France


Photo: Portrait of Leonora Carrington, 2010
© Photoshot / TopFoto - Courtesy Consejo Leonora Carrington, rossogranada and Almine Rech

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