Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 in Lancashire, England and passed away in 2011 at the age of 94 in Mexico City, Mexico. A leading artist of the 20th century, Carrington incorporated painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, printmaking, and writing into a body of work produced throughout her nearly seven-decade career.

Raised in the English upper class, Carrington's early life was privileged, yet her personal freedom was restricted by the conventions of traditional gender roles. However, Carrington's childhood was imbued with magical stories of Celtic mythology and folklore, as told by her Irish mother, grandmother, and nanny. In these fantastic tales of humans, animals, and nature living harmoniously as joined forces against threats of injustice and violence, she found ideas which would profoundly influence the rest of her life.

In 1937, Carrington's mother gifted her a copy of Herbert Read's Surrealism, which served as her first introduction to the growing avant-garde movement. While studying at Amédée Ozenfant's academy, Carrington met Max Ernst, and they began a romantic relationship. Together they moved to Paris where Carrington was introduced to André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Leonor Fini, and the larger community of artists and intellectuals in the city. In 1938, she participated in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris and a Surrealism exhibition in Amsterdam, cementing her position in art history among the Surrealists despite personally disagreeing with the categorization as such. While she and the Surrealists shared a disdain for bourgeois values, Carrington was resolutely autonomous, never ascribing to common Surrealist motifs.

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the German-born Ernst was considered an enemy alien and arrested. Alone in France, Carrington's mental stability weakened. With friends she fled to Spain, but along the journey her psychological state continued to deteriorate, leading to her forced admission into a sanitarium in Santander. She would later recount this experience in her memoir Down Below (1943).

Carrington escaped Spain in 1941 and passed through New York before arriving in Mexico City in 1942. She found a home in Mexico with fellow European émigrés Remedios Varo, who became her close friend, and the Hungarian photographer Emerico "Chiki" Weisz, whom she married in 1946. Carrington continued to exhibit internationally. As she experienced marriage and motherhood, Carrington's work became steeped in archetypically feminine iconography, such as cooking motifs and domestic interior scenes. She recognized the remnants of an ancient magic still present in the acts of making food, having a family, and painting pictures. She saw the similarities between what she was doing at home and what alchemists attempted to do — both involved manipulating inanimate matter to harness its life-endowing properties. It was in this period that Carrington revisited the Renaissance practice of using tempera paint, made from pigment and egg yolk, to imbue her aesthetic vision and the physical substance of her paintings with life itself.  

Her art was well-received in Mexico, and in 1963 Carrington received a government commission to create a mural for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which she titled El mundo mágico de los mayas (The Magical World of the Maya). In the 1960s and 1970s, Carrington became a political activist, hosting student meetings at her home and co-founding the Mexican women's liberation movement in 1972. In the 1980s, the renowned mural was moved to the Regional Museum of Anthropology and History of Chiapas in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, and in 1986 Carrington's political involvement earned her the Lifetime Achievement Award at the United Nations Women's Caucus for Art convention in New York. In 2005, Leonora Carrington received Mexico's National Prize of Sciences and Arts. 

Carrington's work has been acquired by museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate, London, United Kingdom; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum (Cambridge, MA); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City, Mexico), among others.

Since Carrington's passing in 2011, her work has been the subject of the following solo museum exhibitions: Leonora Carrington: Revelation at the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, Spain (2022-2023); Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Monterrey, Mexico (2018); Leonora Carrington at the Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom (2015); and The Celtic Surrealist at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2014). 

Carrington’s first solo museum exhibition in Italy will open at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in October 2025 before traveling to the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris.

Her work has also been featured in the exhibitions In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (2012) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2020) and the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark (2020); Surrealism Beyond Borders at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021) and Tate Modern, London (2022); Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2022) and Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (2022); and the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022), the title of which was taken from a book by Leonora Carrington; and Surréalisme, Centre Pompidou (2024) and Philadelphia Museum of Art (2025).