Mary Leonora Carrington ( April 6, 1917 — May 25, 2011 ) was a Mexican painter, surrealist painter and writer of British descent, born in Westwood House in Clayton Green, Chorley, Lancashire, [5] [6] [7] England. His father Harold Wilde Carrington (1880-1950) was a rich textile manufacturer [6] [8] and his mother Marie (née Moorehead) was Irish.
Leonora Carrington (1917-192011) was born in Lancashire, England to an industrial father and an Irish mother. She grew up with fantastic folk stories told by her Irish nanny on Crookhee Hall Family Estate. Her mother presented her with Herbert Reeds’book Surrealism for Christmas in 1937, a publication that includes a painting by Max Ernst which Carrington immediately addressed as if she had seen it before.
Leonora Carrington OBE (born April 6, 1917 at Clayton Green, Lancashire, England — death May 25, 2011 in Mexico City ) was a Mexican surrealist painter and writer of English descent, known for her memorable, autobiographical and somewhat mysterious imagery of witchcraft, metamorphosis, alchemy and occultism.
Carrington was born into an Irish Catholic upper-class family in England (for example, her father wanted her to be a rookie) against the social expectations that she faced as a young woman of the upper class, born in Lancashire.
Carrington took refuge in art and joined the new art academy founded by the artist Amedi Ozenfant in London in 1936. Carrington moved to Mexico City in late 1942, where she remained for the rest of her life. Carrington attended the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London at the age of 19.
Carrington was struck by the work of Max Ernst and felt a special closeness to his dream painting Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale (1924) She then meets Ernst in Paris and they begin a relationship soon, founding a house in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in the south of France where they often hold their circle of surrealist friends.
Some of Carrington’s works from the 1940s and 1950s contain groups of three women such as Three Women at the Table (1951) they are supposed to depict her, Varo and Kati Horna, another friend. Carrington in self-portrait (1938) offers his own interpretation of female sexuality, examining his own sexual reality instead of theorizing on the topic, as some other surrealists in the movement have done.
Carrington made history when one of his paintings, The Juggler, was auctioned in 2005 for $ 713,000, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living surrealist painter, a tribute to Madonna and Tilda Swinton. who helped recreate her paintings for an editorial in W Magazine. Two artists created statues of guardian animals (Ernst created his birds, and Carrington a plaster horse head) to decorate their home in Saint-Martin-d’Ardes.
Carrington, which depicts hybrids of animals and humans, is easily confused with the wonderful landscapes of surreal art. Based on unmixed colors and psychological oneirism, this painting is a prelude to Carrington’s most lyrical and fantastic mature work created in Mexico City after World War II and characterized by the delicate application of egg temperament. Carrington worked closely with Spanish-Mexican artist Remedios Varo and photographer Katy Horn in Mexico City.
In this sense he expressed Carrington’s change in orientation towards images, history and artwork. Perhaps the novel’s surreal ending was made possible by the environment in which it was created, the artistic community that formed around Carrington in Mexico City: she arrived in 1942 and discovered a city full of socialists and communists in exile, with suspicious luminaries of Mexican muralism securing its art scene.
It married Hungarian photographer Chiki Weiss, gave birth to two children and created a new surreal family formed by two friends, photographer Katy Horna and artist Remedios Varo, a matriarchy seeking to blur the lines between everyday creativity and everyday care work : a more lasting and surreal feminist project than any single novel or school of painting.
In 2006, Moorehead spoke to the artist for the first time in his dark and cold house in Mexico City and naturally pulled out his notebook. Moorehead seemed only to have discovered that the woman, who was barely mentioned at home but was known by her parents as the “Prim” and described as “a negligent daughter, a selfish sister, an absent aunt” was a well-known artist and left later to meet his family’s Black sheep. He was then rebellious at the age of 89 but was immediately “blin
When Joanna Moorehead told Leonora Carrington that her surreal painting by Bosch, The Giantess was sold to Christies in New York for $ 1.5 million in 2005, she thought she was joking. In 2005, Christies auctioned Carringtons Juggler (El Juglar) [51] for $ 713,000, a new record for the highest auction price for a living surrealist artist. Carrington painted portraits of soap opera actor Enrique Alvarez Felix [52]
Its story, published in over twenty editions and in roughly six languages over the past forty years, was reprinted by New York Review Books with an afterword by Polish writer and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarchuk in January after brilliant New York Times and New Yorker reviews of Blake Butler and Merv Emre, sold out in a month.
The third part of the exhibition focuses on Carrington’s “activist” phase in the 1960s and 1970s. The gallery was able to trace the original painting “The Consciousness of Women” (1972), which became the foundation for the iconic poster of the movement for the liberation of women in Mexico, founded by Carrington. We can see that the personal was for Carrington according to the times.
