Exhibition
Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary
12 Jul-26 Oct 2024
Newlands House
Petworth GU28 0DX
Overview
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.
