Leonora Carrington: The Talismanic Lens

This comprehensive look at the career of Leonora Carrington includes small and large works on canvas and paper, as well as photos and ephemera, covering four and a half decades of her extraordinary life and career. Beginning with her explorations of alchemical catharsis through art making and her recovery from a traumatic series of events during World War II, the exhibition follows a sophisticated journey through the world’s various religious, literary and philosophical iconographies.

True throughout her life to her own artistic ambitions, Leonora Carrington is the consummate polymath, forever curious, a mind forever exploring, skeptical and keenly aware and one capable of unique synthetic images that will likely forever defy dialectical thinking. Omnivorous in her interests, a woman incapable of suffering fools, ambidextrous as a painter, draftsman and writer, Carrington’s art has forged a unique path almost entirely independent of more dominant historical trends. Though she is often associated with the original Surrealist movement and its exodus to the United States and Mexico during World War II, Carrington created a disciplined routine in Mexico that produced the embodiment of iconoclasm. Her art is a visual playground for interested viewers, from small children enamored by her colorful fantasies to the most erudite art historian eager to decipher her recombinant methods for transmuting the human, animal, vegetal and mineral, and occasionally elevating ceremonial fantasies to an experience of apotheosis, the elevation of the merely human to the transcendentally divine.

This year marks Leonora’s 90th birthday and the artist plans to travel from her home in Mexico City to celebrate the opening of this exhibition.

Leonora Carrington: The Talismanic Lens