Surreal Spaces. The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington

Long underrated, Carrington is now considered as one of the vanguard, not only in histories of women artists but also Surrealism; her interests – feminism, ecology and life-enhancing art – are now shared by many. Challenging the conventions of her time, Carrington abandoned family, society and England to embrace new experiences and mix with artists in Europe and America, and to forge her own unique artistic style.

From Lancashire to London, Cornwall to France and Spain, then to Mexico, New York and finally back to Mexico, each place and interior became etched in her memory – whether her grandmother’s kitchen with its giant stove, Parisian cafes, a rural French hideaway, the sanatorium in Santander or her Mexican sanctuary – only to be echoed, sometimes decades later, in her paintings and writings. ‘Houses are really bodies,’ she wrote in her novella The Hearing Trumpet (1974), ‘We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood streams.’