<p>"Surreal Friends" brings together for the first time the work of three women Surrealist artists, friends in exile in Mexico in the 1940s: British painter Leonora Carrington, Spanish painter Remedios Varo and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. Leonora Carrington fled to Mexico in the 1940s when her love affair with Max Ernst was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. In Mexico City she found herself liberated from her English upper-class background and from the expectations of the older male Surrealists of whose circle she had been a part in Paris and New York. She made new friendships - with Varo and Horna especially, but also with other refugees from war-torn Europe and with Mexican artists and writers including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Octavio Paz. Remedios Varo arrived in Mexico City in 1941, having fled Nazi-occupied Paris with her lover, the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret. Until her early death in 1963, she produced a wealth of paintings inspired by the spirit and freedom of Mexico, in which magic, humour and illusion feature strongly. Kati Horna was born in Hungary and moved to Paris to pursue a career as a photographer. With her husband Jose Horna she documented the Spanish Civil War, before moving with him to Mexico City in 1939. In Mexico she became a photojournalist for various newspapers and also took on more personal photography projects, much of this work suffused with a Surrealist thread. For all three women, Mexico offered freedom to explore their art in ways that had not been possible in Europe. "Surreal Friends" tells the fascinating story of their artistic friendship.</p>

Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna

Arts & Photography

Raay, Mr Stefan Van

Moorhead, Joanna

Arcq, Teresa

History & Criticism

Lund Humphries

Leonora Carrington developed an iconography of myth, occultism and alchemy that has resonated strongly with younger artists over the past decade and a half. Incredibly gifted as a technician, Carrington was also possessed of a wild imagination, which she realized with great precision in her canvases. Her leading role as a Surrealist in Paris immediately prior to the war, and her life in Mexico City alongside fellow Surrealist expats Remedios Varo, Kati Horna and Edward James, have been the subject of increased interest and scholarly research. This is the first overview of her work to be published since her death in 2011 at the age of 94. Beautifully produced, with a faux-leather binding, a die-cut cover with foil stamping and 138 color plates (including two gatefolds), this volume looks at the many influences on Carrington’s many lives. It explores the Celtic imagery that enchanted her as a child, and the Mexican myths, imagery and stories that informed the second half of her career. Metamorphosis and transformation is an ongoing theme in Carrington’s hybrid world, populated with disconcerting hybrid creatures, elongated women and people metamorphosing into birds. This theme also emerges on a more intimate level in her self-portraits and portraits of friends and family. Writing was of equal importance as painting for Carrington, and this volume is supplemented with excerpts from unpublished manuscripts. Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England. In 1936 she saw Max Ernst’s work at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and met the artist at a party the following year. They became a couple almost immediately; when the outbreak of the Second World War separated them, Carrington was devastated, and fled to Spain, then Lisbon, where she married Renato Leduc, a Mexican diplomat, and escaped to Mexico, where she eventually established herself as one of the country’s most beloved artists.

Leonora Carrington

Ades, Dawn

Mahon, Alyce

Ingarao, Giulia

Weisz, Gabriel

Irish Museum Of Modern Art/D.A.P.

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