Leonora Carrington finally has her first retrospective in Spain

Leonora Carrington (Lancashire, 1917 – Mexico City, 2011), artist and writer, is considered today not only a notable surrealist. In recent decades, it has been claimed as beacon of ecofeminism and alternative knowledge. When we mention Carrington, who chose the form of the horse as Alter egoWe say freedom. At all costs, in the face of any family, social or political imperative. And also, freedom of thought, independence in the search for oneself and understanding the world, persevering desire to investigate until the end.

In this fantastic exhibition, his first retrospective in Spain, this coherence in his search for identity is revealed, based on the series of watercolors moon sisters (1932-33) with empowered fairies, made during his first artistic training in Florence. Already in his maturity he said: “I don’t think anyone escapes childhood.”

References from your imagination have been addedof late Victorian literature from his children's library, populated by Irish legends and tales from the Brothers Grimm, Andersen, the Alicia by Lewis Carroll and own room of Virginia Woolf in her youth, to the white goddess in Robert Graves and all the figures from ancient Mediterranean and Scandinavian cultures that she brought with her, along with arcane knowledge, alchemy and her claim to witchcraft, already amid the wave of feminism in the seventies.

[Leonora Carrington, surrealist]

A imaginary of animals and hybrid beings that she would rediscover in her maturity, in the Mayan cults still practiced in Chiapas, which she would access as an anthropologist to create the large mural that we see at the end of the exhibition, showing the correspondences between the visible and the invisible, micro and macrocosm, male and female, humans and other beings.

The tour of the exhibition, equipped with documents and photographs, and some pieces from his closest colleagues and friends (his lover Max Ernst, his friends Lee Miller It is Leonor Finiand Varo Remedies and kati horna in Colonia Roma in Mexico), in a total of 180 pieces, starts from a first historical approach to lead to a thematic deepening of his work with paintings, drawings, sculptures, toys and tapestries.

Precisely, and as a result of recent research, the emphasis is placed on the European period, when after attending classes in Amédee Ozenfant and meet the group of surrealists in Paris, Leonora Carrington together with Max Ernst will live in a villa in the south of France, where both artists intervene with their works. Then there will be the escape from Nazism and the Leonora's tragic period in Spaindescribed in his well-known autobiography memories belowlater therapeutically dictated, where he mentions a gang rape and describes his hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital in Santander.

Also visit the Prado Museum, where you will keep indelible memories of the characters of El Bosco and Brueghel, later incorporated into their works. And paint a little satirical picture where we already have in nuce to the great painter she will become when she arrives in New York, as a figure she also respects traumatic psychiatric experience among the surrealist émigrés who, in the early forties, with the support of Peggy Guggenheimthey become the group with the most power in the artistic world.

You have to see the egg paintings, they have nothing to do with reproductions: they are a real pleasure for the eyes

O great transformation arrives in Mexico, when in 1943 Carrington endorses the medieval technique and the primitive Renaissance of egg painting which he had admired in Florence, including gold leaf in some paintings. An ancient recipe that corresponds to the culinary and alchemical interests of the painter, who achieves very fine glazes with a brilliant color from an always precise drawing. These paintings must be seen, they have nothing to do with reproductions!

They capture our attention, they are a real treat for the eyes, while we are caught up in the irony, when not openly comical, the syncretic sacredness and the vastness of the referents in these enigmatic images. It is known that Carrington never wanted to explain his paintings. These are deep-rooted images that come from the past, from childhood, perhaps from a universal unconscious.

The result of a great effort and the collaboration of good number of institutional and private borrowersAmong these paintings today there is no shortage of authentic icons well known as oil Green Tea, 1942, based on an Irish tale and which refers to the break with the family. And the tempering on the table the giant1947, monumental in format, dedicated to Demeter and clearly reminiscent of Piero della Francesca, whose intuition would be confirmed shortly afterwards by the white goddess1948, by Robert Graves who, after years of research, affirmed the existence of a universal matriarchy prior to patriarchal erasure.

Along these lines, oil on canvas is also striking. Are you speaking Syrian?, 1953, where the Babylonian Ishtar, Isis for the Egyptians and Astarte for the Semites, meet under the wonderful stellar firmament and in front of the white figure that continues weaving the threads of time. Two decades later, Carrington created a protest poster for feminists, in the original of which, a gouache in exceptionally exposed cardboard, female consciousness1972, all green, the myth of Adam and Eve is subverted. Feminist conviction that she maintained until the endas is evident in the tempering the cupcakes1986, and the bronze Goddess2008.

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