The exhibition, curated by Giulia Ingarao and Tere Arcq, is on paper a triumph: lastly, Italy dedicates a full-scale retrospective to one of the vital radical, complicated and visionary artists of the twentieth Century. Greater than sixty works hint Leonora Carrington’s trajectory from British Surrealist circles to her self-exile in Mexico, from delusion and alchemy to feminist prophecy. But there’s one thing uneasy in regards to the timing: the present opens just a few months after a serious Milanese exhibition devoted to Leonor Fini, one other essential but long-neglected determine on the surrealist margins. It’s tempting to learn this sequence as a long-overdue redress—but additionally as a curatorial sample, an indication that girls Surrealists have gotten the newest aesthetic pattern, a handy cluster of names to tick off the inclusion guidelines.
Over the previous few years, these artists—Carrington, Fini, Hilma af Klint, Remedios Varo—have been in all places: their work reprinted, their tales reclaimed, their works adorning museum banners and tote luggage. It’s thrilling to see them lastly acknowledged, however the artwork world’s enthusiasm typically feels performative, even beauty. There’s a superb line between recognition and tokenism, and establishments nonetheless are likely to cross it with well-meaning decorum. The “feminine Surrealist” has develop into a style: an object of rediscovery, introduced with reverent tone and a faint home gloss.
That gloss is in all places at Palazzo Reale. The exhibition unfolds by six chapters: The Starting of a Grand Tour into Life, The Bride of the Wind, Displacement, The Heroine’s Journey, The Luminous Darkish and The Alchemical Kitchen. They carve a path that mirrors the artist’s life from the post-Victorian creativeness of her youth to her years of alchemical knowledge in Mexico. The partitions, painted in saturated hues of cobalt, crimson and forest inexperienced, are draped with skinny, virtually translucent curtains. They don’t enclose the area a lot as veil it—a gentle filter over Carrington’s untamable pressure. It’s a phenomenal gesture, however one which dangers domesticating her wildness, remodeling her visionary rigor into décor.
The exhibition textual content invitations guests to rediscover Carrington as a key determine of Surrealism and the worldwide avant-garde, emphasizing her lifelong journey by metamorphosis, reinvention and discovery. But throughout the rooms, it’s the scenography that always instructions consideration. The partitions are dotted with elegantly printed quotations—some real, others curatorial—glowing softly below the spotlights. They give the impression of being virtually like designer aphorisms, curated for a “museum selfie second.” The chance is evident: to show a present of such gravity into an Instagrammable expertise—a sequence of poised pauses through which the customer performs their enlightenment. The end result, at occasions, feels much less like an exhibition with a strong art-historical spine and extra like a superbly groomed occasion: a sophisticated floor that conceals the urgency and rigor of Carrington’s thought.
And but Carrington’s work refuses any type of containment. Grandmother Moorhead’s Fragrant Kitchen (1974), chosen because the exhibition’s picture, is just not the comfy home scene its title suggests however a form of ritual laboratory: women-cooks as alchemists, stirring worlds into being. The Parts (1946) and The Lovers (1987) rework love and nature into charged, otherworldly programs of trade; A Map of the Human Animal (1962) renders the physique as a constellation of metamorphoses, a cartography of turning into. Nothing about these works asks to be softened. They’re fierce, extreme, irreducible.
Carrington, like Fini and af Klint, was not there to brighten modernism—she was there to detonate it. Her apply dismantled hierarchies of human and animal, spirit and matter, female and male. Her work are acts of rise up disguised as visions. But too usually, curators neutralize this radicality by over-explaining the biographical context: her relationship with Max Ernst, her breakdown, her exile in Mexico. These narratives are legitimate, however after they precede the work, they re-inscribe the very hierarchy they need to dismantle. Male artists are mythologized by their oeuvre; ladies are narrated by their lovers, traumas and home lives. The label nonetheless does the disciplining.
The exhibition’s trajectory, from her childhood drawings like Sisters of the Moon to the esoteric maturity of Sous la rose des vents (1955), follows a religious evolution, the “heroine’s journey” that provides its title to one of many sections. It’s right here that the present’s thesis emerges most clearly: Carrington redefined information itself, shifting from fairy tales to Gurdjieff, from alchemy to ecofeminism, from insanity to mystical lucidity. In The Luminous Darkish, her fascination with occult traditions—tarot, astrology, cabala—is introduced not as escapism however as epistemology, a way of understanding the world by transformation.
The ultimate part, The Alchemical Kitchen, is maybe essentially the most revelatory. Borrowing Susan Aberth’s time period, it reclaims the kitchen—an area of girls’s work, of supposed confinement—as a crucible of energy. Carrington’s fascination with the “witches’ market” of Mexico Metropolis, her experiments with tempera and egg yolk, her meticulous, shimmering brushwork: all converge right here into an ars combinatoria of physique and cosmos. As Edward James as soon as wrote, “Her work usually are not merely painted—they’re brewed.”
And but, the scenography nonetheless hesitates to let her darkness totally unfold. These skinny curtains, the ambient lighting, the polished wall texts—they soften what must be searing. They attempt to make her accessible, digestible, even photogenic. The result’s a contradiction: a radical artist framed within the language of gentleness. A revolution padded with velvet.
The actual feminist act could be to strip away the material—to let Carrington’s luminous darkness radiate with out apology or mediation. Her world doesn’t have to be beautified or defined; it must be confronted. Her work already holds the keys to the transformation the artwork world claims to hunt.
As a result of this current wave of exhibitions dedicated to ladies Surrealists is each a revolution and a danger. It lastly provides them area, nevertheless it additionally tends to sanctify them, to make them “exceptions” quite than architects of a brand new canon. The following step have to be to combine them not as symbols of inclusion however as foundations of one other artwork historical past written from the margins inward.
Seeing Carrington’s work gathered collectively—The Lovers, Orplied, Snake chunk floripondio—is an unforgettable expertise: luminous, uncontainable, alive. The issue isn’t the work; it’s the body. Recognition is just not revolution. Illustration is just not liberation. The revolution Carrington envisioned, the place transformation is freedom, and freedom is information, nonetheless lies forward, shimmering past the following curtain.
So sure, let’s have a good time this new visibility of girls Surrealists, however let’s achieve this critically, with out mistaking visibility for victory. Carrington didn’t paint to be trendy; she painted to outlive, to invent new types of being. To honor her is to not hold her in a gauze-lit room with elegantly printed quotes, however to tear the veil and let her wildness burn by the canon itself. Till then, these rediscoveries will stay what they too usually are: well mannered corrections, curated revolutions with matching curtains.
“Leonora Carrington” is on view at Palazzo Reale, Milan, by January 11, 2025.
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