Fundación MAPFRE presents the first retrospective of Leonora Carrington in Spain

The Mapfre Madrid Foundation presents Leonora Carrington. Revelation, the first anthological exhibition devoted to this artist held in the State. A versatile and eclectic author, constantly in search of new forms of expression, Carrington is a key figure in forming a more complete image of 20th century art. Ahead of her time in her concern for ecology and women's rights, the author developed a language with which she evoked "a fascinating world of magical rituals where nothing is what it seems and the most incredible transformations happen". in the words of Tere Arcq, curator of the exhibition together with Carlos Martín and Stefan van Raay, director of the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Amstelveen, in the Netherlands.

The exhibition that brings together 188 works (including paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, tapestries and documents) unfolds along 10 sections, combines the biographical account with the study of the most prominent themes in Carrington's work. After addressing its origins in post-Victorian England, the link to surrealism and the passage through Spain, the exhibition delves into interests such as the position of women in the world and in history, uprooting and migrations, the 'esotericism and magic or religious and cultural syncretism. The figure of Leonora Carrington is revealed as that of an artist whose work finds numerous echoes in the concerns and challenges of today's world.

Among the pieces on display are the decorative set made for the house he shared with Max Ernst in the south of France; Down Below, the only painting located between the two he made in Spain, and which inspires his Memoirs of down; other key works such as Green Tea (MoMA in New York) or The House Opposite (West Dean College), where he presents an authentic inventory of his experiences until arriving in Mexico. The exhibition is crowned with the great project for the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico, the mural The magical world of the Mayans, which has only crossed the Atlantic on one previous occasion and is now being presented to the Spanish public for the first time.

Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington (Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, 1917-Mexico City, 2011) was born in the north-west of England into an upper-class family. At the age of fifteen he traveled to Florence, where he had the opportunity to see the paintings of the Italian old masters. Already back in the United Kingdom, in 1936 he managed to get his parents to allow him to study art in London, where in June he visited the first surrealist exhibition in Great Britain and the following year fell in love with the work of Max Ernst during a solo show of this, whom he meets immediately at a dinner party and begins a relationship with him that does not have the approval of his parents. The couple quickly moves to Paris, which causes a rift between Leonora and her family.

In the French capital, and despite her refusal to enter the group officially, Leonora joins the Surrealists. The couple soon moved to the town of Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche, in Provence, but their lives were immediately affected by the arrival of Nazism. Max Ernst is arrested for his German origin and, therefore, is considered an enemy of France; Leonora flees to Spain, where she is admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Santander after suffering a nervous breakdown.

After a harsh and torturous treatment, the artist went to Madrid and then to Lisbon, where she was able to embark for New York with her new husband, Renato Leduc. At the end of 1942 they settled in Mexico, where she developed her mature work. In 1962 he received the commission to paint the mural The magical world of the Mayas for the National Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec, Mexico City. Due to the student revolts and the Tlatelolco massacre, in 1968 Carrington decided to leave the country together with his children.

During the following twenty-five years he lived in the United States, first in New York and later in Chicago. In 2000 she was named an Honorary Citizen of Mexico DF, where she had returned in 1990, and in November of the same year she received the decoration of the Order of the British Empire at the residence of the ambassador of the United Kingdom in Mexico

In May 2011, the artist died of pneumonia at the age of ninety-four