Leonora Carrington's triumphant posthumous return to Spain

"Memories from Below" is an account by Leonora Carrington (Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, 1917-Mexico City, 2011) of her time in the psychiatric hospital of Dr. Morales in Santander. She was admitted there after suffering several nervous breakdowns after fleeing from Provence in 1940 in the face of the unstoppable advance of German troops and the arrest of her companion, Max Ernst, the man whose art fascinated her to the point of breaking with her bourgeois English family to join him and his destiny.  

Leonora died in 2011 at the age of 94. Now, she returns to Spain in an extraordinary exhibition at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid, where no less than 188 works are on display, including paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, tapestries and various documents, behind which we can see the painstaking but effective work of the show's curators, Tere Arcq and Carlos Martin. As the latter states, "Leonora was born before her time, which, as happens to all those who are ahead of their time, only find glory posthumously".  

The vicissitudes of the Second World War, the arrest of her companion Max Ernst by the Nazis and her flight to Spain, gave Leonora the opportunity to visit the Prado Museum and confirm her love of Italian Florentine painting, but above all to discover and contemplate the works of Bosch, Brueghel the Elder and Patinir, which had such an impact on her and which were decisive in her later work. It is for this reason that in her work we often find in her canvases small hybrid beings reminiscent of those in Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights", as well as backgrounds with strange landscapes populated by elements that seem to have been extracted from dreams.

There are also examples in the exhibition of Leonora the writer, who showed herself to be attracted to fairy tales from an early age, a fascination that intensified after her encounter with Max Ernst and the rest of the Surrealists. Lewis Carroll and the Brothers Grimm were always present in her writings, in which she expressed the themes that particularly interested her: alchemy, kabbalah, ancestral myths and the dislocation of the space-time relationship, all elements that are found in her artistic production. Thus, in her production appear hybrid beings, fairies and powerful witches, animals speak and humans become animals.  

Carrington also frequently portrays herself through other characters or animals that act as the artist herself. Her alter egos - the "other self" - are often hyenas, trees or horses, but also goddesses - such as the White Goddess - or spinners and weavers, sometimes represented by the spinning wheel, obvious allusions to feminine power. Spinning is associated with the feminine condition, wise women, witches, etc. In this sense, the artist herself dedicated herself for years to making tapestries, in collaboration with the Rosales family, famous Mexican weavers.  

Carrington was particularly fascinated by the witchcraft practices and rituals that are part of everyday Mexican life. She was 25 years old when she first arrived in Mexico, a place where everything was new to her: the rituals surrounding death, as well as the beliefs in guardian animals and protective entities that resonate within her with the Celtic myths and traditions she had absorbed in her childhood.  Welcome back to Spain, albeit so long after that unique experience that brought the bitterness of those dark times of totalitarianism.