Leonora Carrington valuation
Lancashire-born Surrealist who spent most of her life in Mexico, painting animals, ritual and transformation.
Leonora Carrington was born at Clayton Green in Lancashire in 1917 into a wealthy textile family, studied at Amédée Ozenfant's academy in London, and in 1937 met Max Ernst and went with him to France.
What a work by Leonora Carrington is worth
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Bio
Leonora Carrington was born at Clayton Green in Lancashire in 1917 into a wealthy textile family, studied at Amédée Ozenfant's academy in London, and in 1937 met Max Ernst and went with him to France. When Ernst was interned at the outbreak of war she suffered a breakdown and was confined to an asylum in Santander, which she described in her memoir Down Below. In 1942 she reached Mexico, where she lived for most of the rest of her life, close to Remedios Varo, painting a private world of animals, hybrid creatures, ritual and alchemy, and writing fiction, among it The Hearing Trumpet. She died in Mexico City in 2011.
Paintings in oil and tempera from the 1940s and 1950s lead the market, and her output also includes drawings, gouaches, prints, tapestries and bronzes, many of the bronzes cast late in her life in editions, for which the edition and the date of casting matter. Her standing has risen considerably since the major exhibitions of the 2010s, and documented provenance and the specialist literature are the reference for attribution.
Ozenfant, Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche and Mexico
In 1938 Carrington showed in the International Surrealist Exhibitions in Paris and Amsterdam, and lived with Ernst at Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche. In Mexico she married the photographer Emerico 'Chiki' Weisz, and in 1963 painted the mural El mundo mágico de los mayas for the National Museum of Anthropology.
Tate Liverpool gave her a retrospective in 2015, and in 2022 her book The Milk of Dreams gave its title to the Venice Biennale.
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