The surrealist Leonora Carrington led a "fascinating life", said Artlyst magazine. Born to an upper-class family in Lancashire, she escaped a world of debutante balls and conventional expectations to become an artist in Paris. There, Carrington (1917-2011) had a "passionate affair" with the great German surrealist Max Ernst and mixed with the likes of Picasso, Dalí, Miró and Duchamp.
When war came, she made "a dramatic escape" to Mexico, where she spent the rest of her life producing "a diverse body of work" in many mediums, which combined European surrealism with the folkloric traditions of her adopted homeland. Carrington was long "under-appreciated", her art "overshadowed" by her "tumultuous" biography; but in recent years this has begun to change.
This May, her 1945 painting "Les Distractions de Dagobert" fetched £22.5m at Sotheby's, becoming the single most expensive work by a British woman ever sold at auction. Now a new show at Newlands House in Petworth, in West Sussex, "offers a comprehensive look at Carrington's imaginative and diverse career". Showcasing more than 70 pieces, including paintings, sculptures, tapestries and jewellery, it is a "must-see exhibition" that honours Carrington's "extraordinary talent and creativity".
The exhibition is "an ecstatic reminder of all that is liberating in surrealist art", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian . The movement was considered "old-hat" by the late 1940s, but Carrington, who cared nothing for consensus, continued "making dream art many decades after dreams like hers went out of fashion".
Carrington's imagination "throws out creatures and ghosts and demons". One sculpture, entitled "The Old Magdalena" (1988), sees a woman entirely covered with hair standing as "a sentinel of strangeness". Elsewhere, there are murals created with Mayan textile workers, and masks inspired by Aztec and Mayan culture. "With bad surrealism, you feel it's fake or forced." Carrington's never feels like that; it is authentically weird to its core. For instance, "Daughter of the Minotaur" (2010), a "captivating" bronze, depicts its subject as a "horned beast" with a slender, gender-fluid body. It is "entrancing in its sheer oddity and, above all, conviction. It is real."
I had reservations about this show before visiting, said Laura Freeman in The Times . Surrealism is not really my thing: "I am dead set against other people's dreams", mystical experiences and "associated woo-woo". Yet while there is "imaginative excess" here – "dragons and firebirds, silent sphinxes and taloned beasts, a cow that is half-cactus" – Carrington executes them with impressive "elegance" and "economy of line", convincing with her "sheer force of personality" and "singular, spectral artistic vision".
Her versatility, meanwhile, is extremely impressive: beyond the paintings and sculptures, we see examples of her "painted furniture", "elaborately furred costume designs" and even papier- mâché heads created for a production of "The Tempest". This is an exhibition of "unearthly delights". I left it "captivated".
Newlands House Gallery, Petworth. Until 26 October
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