LEONORA CARRINGTON’S INFINITE PORTAL

Leonora Carrington is a visual artist capable of combining the most enigmatic influences and references, who creates in each line a personal cosmology and activates a struggle to find her place in the world.

Carrington, for whom the concept of metamorphosis is fundamental, undergoes several transformations that mark her biography: declassed from her well-to-do birth position in post-Victorian England; linked to surrealism and rebelling against her subaltern position within it; victim of violence and stigmatization of her mental illness; migrant, exile, mother. All of these episodes were revelations for the artist that allowed her to "take off and put on at will the mask that is going to be my shield against the hostility of Conformism".

The exhibition focuses on the motifs that cross transversally a complex and arcane discourse in which the public can feel as much fascination as bewilderment: the elaboration of trauma, the introspection into personal origins and their foundational stories; her involvement with female figures of ancestral and sacred character; her identification with the animal world, which converges in the paradigm of ecofeminism; her absorption of cultural elements from the places she passes through, from Renaissance painting in Florence to Mesoamerican art in Mexico; or her interest in non-canonical forms of thought and spirituality, such as alchemy, magic, tarot or mythologies erased from history.

This exhibition, the first in Spain dedicated to Carrington, returns the artist to the country that was a turning point for her, a point of no return, a transit to other worlds. It offers an artist who, today, more than a hundred years after her birth, is presented as a revelation.

Painter, sculptor and writer among many other things, Leonora Carrington (Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, 1917-Mexico City, 2011) was one of the most relevant artists in the ranks of surrealism. Her artistic career was always marked by her agitated biography, which made her an eccentric and tragic person. But her work should not be interpreted only as the manifestation of an unstable mind. On the contrary, it is the fruit of an extraordinary imagination, creator of an aesthetic, symbolic and conceptual world not always easily decipherable. Versatile artist, continuously in search of new forms of expression, her paintings, drawings, writings, tapestries or sculptures speak of aspects of the human being (fear, pain, joy, strangeness or happiness) in a direct way that challenges us and confronts us to contrast our own certainties and uncertainties.