Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington defied her aristocratic English heritage to study painting in London, subsequently eloping to Paris in 1937 with Max Ernst and entering the core of the Surrealist vanguard. Traumatized by Ernst's wartime internment and her own harrowing incarceration in a Spanish psychiatric hospital, she escaped to Lisbon and Mexico.

In Mexico City, Carrington formed an extraordinary intellectual partnership with Spanish painter Remedios Varo and photographer Kati Horna. Her tempera paintings teem with zoomorphic beings, alchemical kitchens, and Celtic faeries, subverting orthodox male Surrealism by portraying woman not as muse, but as mystical creator and sovereign magus.