Her friend and patron, the poet Edward James, affirmed that Carrington was “endowed from birth with the versatility of a Renaissance man … a sort of Philip Sidney.” The ideal of the humanist polymath flourished in her, and although best known for painting and writing, she was endlessly experimental in her practice, harnessing drawing, sculpture, textiles and tapestry, jewelry, printmaking, and theater design to give shape to her interior landscape.

Carrington approached her craft with the meticulous care of a master, rendering oneiric scenes like The House Opposite (1945) and Orplied (1955) in fine brushstrokes of egg tempera or oil in shades of cinnabar, burnt umber, and mineral blue. “The real work is done when you’re alone in your studio and that’s it,” she famously stated.  

For her that work was a means of giving form to the ineffable: a ritual vessel for the hypnagogic visions and resurfaced memories that bubbled and brewed upon the canvas. As exhibition co-curator Tere Arcq notes, Carrington’s art enacts a kind of embodied understanding—she does not simply show us what she knows but inhabits it in the process of creation. Hers was a “map of the soul drawn not in theory but through the lived experience of revelation.”

Although she spent periods of time in North America, and often felt the pull of nostalgia for the England of her youth, it was in Mexico that Carrington found a lasting sense of belonging. There, in a land where syncretic rites and Indigenous mythologies are threaded through everyday life, the veil between the physical and the spiritual became ever more thin.

From her arrival in 1942, her work was increasingly shaped by the unexpected joys of motherhood and the domestic sphere. Underpinned by intellectual kinship and a strong social conscience, she also forged enduring bonds of sorority with fellow exiled European artists such as Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. The trio would come to be referred to as the “three witches of surrealism.”

Carrington was legendary for sidestepping any attempt to explain her work. Toward the end of her life, in conversation with the writer Chloe Aridjis, she flashed that defiant streak: “You’re trying, desperately, to intellectualize me. And you’re wasting your time.” Although she did not court notoriety, this oracular quality and resolute self-possession have led to growing critical engagement with the artist in recent years, from an expanding body of scholarship and creative interpretation to international exhibitions like the 2022 Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, the curatorial theme of which was inspired by Carrington’s children’s book of the same name.

For all her flights of imagination, Leonora Carrington was attuned to the “dailiness” of being, where the ordinary and the numinous coexist and meaning is left for the individual to divine. As she observed, “There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.”