Surrealism is a century old, if you date it from the publication of its first manifesto in Paris in 1924. Leonora Carrington claimed never to have read it. She was only seven when it appeared, growing up far from the Left Bank in a gothic English mansion where Nanny filled her head with fairytales. Yet when Carrington died in Mexico City in 2011 at the age of 94, she was one of the last living participants in the original surrealist movement. This exhibition in a rambling rural gallery is an ecstatic reminder of all that is liberating in surrealist art.
It’s also an encounter with a woman now getting her due as one of modern art’s greats. In May, her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert sold for $28.5m at Sotheby’s, making her the most expensive British female artist of all time. Yet when her (much younger) cousin the writer Joanna Moorhead, who has lovingly curated this show, sought her out in her later years she was largely forgotten. Think of it: a living surrealist, still working in her cabinet of curiosities of a home in Mexico where she’d settled in the 1940s, unnoticed, unfussed over back home through the 90s and noughties, while the British art world got excited over the latest Hirst or Perry.
