TALISMANS D'UN VOYAGE SACRÉ: LEONORA CARRINGTON cur. Fermín Llamazares & Laurent Doucet

As a result of a meeting between curators Fermín Llamazares, Director of the Consejo Leonora Carrington in Mexico City, Laurent Doucet, poet and President of the association “La Rose Impossible”, which saved André Breton’s house in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie (Lot), and Vincent Sator, Director of Galerie Sator, the exhibition presents just over a hundred works by Leonora Carrington.  This tribute to the British-Mexican artist is organized as part of the centenary celebration of the first Surrealist Manifesto, around the Centre Pompidou’s “Surrealism” exhibition and in partnership with the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art and the Association-Atelier André Breton.

Through a series of installations and previously unseen pieces, Leonora Carrington’s “Talismans from a Sacred Journey” reveals the artist’s deep connection with the spiritual, the magical and the cosmic, offering the audience a unique opportunity to enter her intimate universe. The exhibition explores Carrington’s lesser-known side, not only as a visionary artist, but also as a creator of objects conceived as protective talismans for life’s spiritual journey.

The exhibition invites you to discover the complexity of her work, through works that explore this hidden and intimate side of the artist: astral journeys through the star of Sirius in “L’Antre de l’Extra-terrestre” (“The Alien’s Lair”), ritual and magical objects in “La Vitrine des Gardiens” (“The Guardians’ Vitrine”), unique works offering an unprecedented view of her inner world, or “Le Mur des Labyrinthes” and “Les Lieux du Minotaure” (“The Wall of Mazes” and “The Minotaur’s places”), recalling her deep relationship with the world of mythology. As for the “Théâtre de Guignol de Tartaro” (Guignol de Tartaro’s Theater”), it recalls Carrington’s fascination with horses and puppets. “Horses appear through all the windows of Leonora Carrington’s weightless universe,” writes Max Ernst, who was her companion before her confinement and exile.

Born in England in 1917, Leonora Carrington found Mexico as the ideal place to develop her art. After fleeing a Europe devastated by the Second World War, she settled in Mexico City, where she met figures such as Remedios Varo and Benjamin Péret, as well as the Hungarian photographer Chiki Weisz, whom she later married. In Mexico, Carrington finally gained the creative freedom to produce the most emblematic part of her work, always in touch with the esoteric and surrealist currents that nourished it.

“Talismans from a Sacred Journey” does not focus on the Leonora Carrington work that we know, whose pieces are in the collections of the world’s most prestigious museums, but celebrates the ‘other Leonora’, the one who used art as a ”mystical tool of protection and whose many creations have remained hidden until now.”

Leonora Carrington’s legacy and her link to esotericism resonate with renewed force in this tribute, reaffirming the relevance of surrealism in the 21st century more as a way of life than an artistic movement.