Lancashire, England, 1917 – Mexico City, Mexico, 2011.

A leading artist of the 20th century, Carrington’s body of work including paintings, drawings, writings and more, was produced throughout her nearly seven-decade career.

Raised in the English upper class, Carrington’s childhood was imbued with magical stories of Celtic mythology and folklore, as told by her Irish mother. In these fantastic tales of humans, animals, and nature living harmoniously as joined forces against threats of injustice and violence, she found ideas which would profoundly influence the rest of her life. In 1937 while studying art in London, Carrington met Max Ernst, and they began a romantic relationship. Together they moved to Paris where Carrington was introduced to André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Leonor Fini, and the larger community of artists and intellectuals in the city, cementing her position in art history among the Surrealists. While she and the Surrealists shared a disdain for bourgeois values, Carrington never ascribed to common Surrealist motifs. The male Surrealists worshipped her as a muse, a witch—not the old and ugly kind, André Breton explained, but an enchantress with “a smooth, mocking gaze.” Carrington felt discomfort by the way male Surrealists had treated women as artificial beings. Fellow Surrealist Salvador Dali, in his essay “The New Colors of Spectral Sex Appeal” (1934), had prophesied that the modern woman would appear a luminous paradox, animate and inanimate, carnal and ghostly; perfect for being desired and for being painted but not for creating an art of her own.

At the outbreak of World War II, the German-born Ernst was considered an enemy and arrested. With friends she fled to Spain, but along the journey her mental health weakened, leading to her forced admission into a sanitarium in Santander. She would later recount this experience in her memoir Down Below (1943).

In 1942 she found a home in Mexico City with fellow European émigrés and artists Remedios Varo and “Chiki” Weisz, whom she married in 1946. Carrington continued to exhibit internationally. As she experienced marriage and motherhood, her work became steeped in archetypically feminine iconography, such as cooking motifs and domestic interior scenes. She recognised the remnants of an ancient magic still present in the acts of making food, having a family, and painting pictures. She saw the similarities between what she was doing at home and what alchemists attempted to do, transforming inanimate matter to harness its life-endowing properties Her art was well-received in Mexico, and in 1963 Carrington received a government commission to create a mural for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which she titled El mundo mágico de los mayas (The Magical World of the Maya). In the 1960s and 1970s, Carrington became a political activist, co-founding the Mexican women’s liberation movement in 1972. In 1986 Carrington’s political involvement earned her the Lifetime Achievement Award at the United Nations Women’s Caucus for Art convention in New York. Carrington’s work has been exhibited and acquired by museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art,New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Tate, London, United Kingdom, or the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy, among others.