Leonora Carrington | Mythopoesis

For its inaugural exhibition of 2025, Gallery Wendi Norris presents Leonora Carrington: Mythopoesis, its fifth Carrington exhibition and the first Carrington show in San Francisco in ten years. From gothic fairy tales to Celtic legends and multicultural myths, Leonora Carrington: Mythopoesis examines the origin stories and literary influences that fueled her boundless creativity and subversive sensibility. Taking its title from the Ancient Greek word meaning “the making of myths,” the exhibition explores how Carrington transformed and translated these forms of storytelling across diverse visual mediums, shaping her complex and expansive oeuvre into a visionary universe.

Featuring approximately fifteen artworks executed between 1940 and 1987, this presentation highlights the broad and under-explored range of media in which Carrington worked. In addition to paintings and drawings, the exhibition includes a tapestry, one of her largest painted sculptures, a toy carriage, and a playful object, that together reveal the depth and versatility of her artistic practice. Accompanying the exhibition is a richly illustrated catalogue that features new scholarship on Carrington and an in-depth analysis of the works on view.

“Leonora Carrington’s work continues to surprise and delight even the most seasoned scholars and collectors,” says Melanie Cameron, Senior Director at Gallery Wendi Norris. “With Mythopoesis, we are honored to present a side of Carrington that is both familiar and refreshing.”

Throughout her career, Carrington invented a fantastical universe populated by a motley cast of characters: chimerical ghoulies, historical figures, anthropomorphic oddities, primordial gods and goddesses, feisty crones, and mythical creatures. Together, these beings engage in rituals and perform miniaturized dramas within each artwork. The largescale La cuna (The Cradle) (c. 1945) and diminutive Untitled (1946) are distinctive objects within Carrington’s oeuvre, and demonstrate how she channeled her mythopoetic approach into the creation of transportive sculptural objects. In La cuna, Carrington painted the hull of the sailboat-cum-cradle carved by artist José Horna with an enchanted tree sprouting from an enormous egg, from which a procession of hybrid creatures parade through a watery realm. While the creatures in La cuna seem to sprout from Carrington’s imagination, those in the luminous painting Sidhe, the White People of Tuatha dé Danann (1954), which is on view for the first time in 27 years, are taken straight from Celtic mythology. Making its public debut is the cosmic painting, Equinoxio (1958), featuring her animal surrogate, the horse, in a celestial setting. Meanwhile, Untitled (c. 1948–1955), kept privately for decades, exemplifies her engagement with pre-Columbian iconography. In this work, she turns to the mythology of her adopted home, Mexico, depicting the Aztec plumed serpent god, Quetzalcoatl.

Gallery Wendi Norris is the world’s preeminent dealer of Leonora Carrington’s work, with the longest history of showcasing her art since 2004. The gallery’s last solo showcase of Carrington’s work was the critically acclaimed 2019 exhibition Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg in New York City as part of its offsite exhibition program.

About 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.

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, among others.

Carrington’s visionary art has garnered increasing global attention in recent years. Since her passing in 2011, her work has been the subject of several solo museum exhibitions: Leonora Carrington at the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark and Leonora Carrington: Revelation at the 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). Her artwork has been featured in international group exhibitions, including Surrealism Beyond Borders (The Metropolitan Museum, 2021-2022 and Tate Modern, 2022); Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernities (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2022 and Museum Barberini, 2023); and the 2022 Venice Biennale, whose title and curatorial direction was inspired by Carrington’s book of children’s stories, The Milk of Dreams. Carrington’s artwork is currently on view in the landmark exhibition, Surréalisme (Centre Pompidou, 2024 and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2025), and her first solo museum show in Italy will open at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in October 2025 before traveling to the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris.