Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary
12 July to 26 October 2024
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★★★★★ “This is an ecstatic reminder of all that is liberating in surrealist art by an extraordinary artist who was still unlocking her unconscious well into her 90s”
– Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
In May 2024 Leonora Carrington became the most successful female artist in UK history, in terms of sales: her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for USD$28.5 million.
Her legacy is now on a new footing. Last year, the Wall Street Journal predicted she would be the next Frida Kahlo. Like Kahlo, Carrington’s life was as surreal as her paintings; like Kahlo, she drew heavily on her own extraordinary experiences in her work.
For many years, this eventful life story – especially her love affair with Max Ernst, and her spell in a Spanish asylum, which fascinated others in her Surrealist circles – have been central to discussions of her work. But Carrington was no muse. As she said: “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”
Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary (12 July – 26 October) will re-examine her work in the light of her posthumous success. An artist who broke boundaries and created imaginative new worlds. Carrington was – like all the greats – a creator in many different directions. As her long-time friend and patron Edward James said: “She…never relinquished her love of experimentation; the results being that she [was] able to diversity and explore a hundred or more techniques for the expression of her creative powers.”
This summer, Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, Sussex brings together a wide range of Carrington’s work, to show the span of her output across a wide range of media. Loans will include a wall of masks; a series of masks made for a theatrical production of The Tempest in the 1950s; original lithographs; tapestries; sketches; sculptures; jewellery – and of course paintings. Together they will show the full range of Carrington’s prolific and original output, across a career that spanned eight decades.
As the feminist art collective The Guerrilla Girls wryly commented, being a woman artist comes with certain advantages: these include being able to work without the pressures of success, and discovering your career picks up in your eighties.
Today, more than a decade after her death in May 2011, Carrington’s time has come. Newlands House Gallery will focus on the breadth, the variety and the extraordinary imagination of work across her eight-decade career.
– Joanna Moorhead, Exhibition Curator
Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary
Opening Hours:
Wednesday to Saturday 10am – 5pm
Sunday 11am – 4pm
Tickets:
General Admission (16 years and over): £14.50
Child Admission, under 10 years is free. 10 years to 16 years: £7.25
NHS Staff £7.25 (ID required)
Students £7.25 (ID required)
Family ticket: (2 Adults + 2 Children): £30.00
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The exhibition was made possible with the support of the Leonora Carrington Consejo and rossogranada, the exclusive representative of Leonora Carrington Consejo in the UK, Europe and Switzerland.
Images courtesy of the Leonora Carrington Council and rossogranada.
