PV - Houses are really bodies: the writing of Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011) was born in England but spent most of her life in Mexico. Widely recognized as one of the last remaining participants of the Surrealist movement until her death in 2011, she was also a writer and founding member of the Mexican Women’s Liberation Movement.

Carrington has, at times, been left out of the traditional art historical canon, often categorized instead for love affairs, beauty and a much misunderstood period of mental illness. Much has been done to correct this in recent times; culminating in her centenary this year with celebrations of the artist and her work taking place internationally.

This exhibition considers Carrington’s role as a resistor; an artist who achieved both personal and political change through lifelong acts of defiance, enabling her to escape the English class system, patriarchy and incarceration. This defiance, alongside her commitment to friendship and personal transformation were channelled via surrealism and the fantastical both personally and for the humans and animals she depicted in her work.

Houses are really bodies explores the artist’s writing and the ideas and matters that emerge from this work. The exhibition, designed with vPPR Architects, brings visitors together in a collective moment, to hear excerpts from her most famous story, an ode to ageing, The Hearing Trumpet, the description of her time in an asylum Down Below and the short stories The Debutante, The Sand Camel, The House of Fear and The Happy Corpse Story.

The exhibition includes a reading room featuring selected resource materials alongside original works by Carrington.

In her lifetime Carrington was featured in exhibitions at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, France (1938); The Serpentine Gallery, London, (1991); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2001) and had solo exhibitions at Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City (1956 & 1969) and Art Company, Leeds (1990). Posthumously Carrington has had solo exhibitions at The Irish Museum of Modern Art (2013) and Tate Liverpool (2015). She is featured in collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

The readers, a selection of old and new friendships, are: Chloe Aridjis; Maggi Adams; Kristian Cooper; Laure Garrard; Maike Hale-Jones; Jasleen Kaur; Lorraine O’Grady; Heather Phillipson and Angharad Williams.

More information: http://cubittartists.org.uk/2017/04/06/houses-are-really-bodies/