Surreal Spaces
The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington
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- 34,99 €
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- 34,99 €
Publisher Description
An evocative visual chronicle on the life of Leonora Carrington as seen through interiors, international locations and vintage photographs, this book leads the reader on a personal journey through the many spaces she inhabited and which infused and haunted her art and the people she knew.
Long underrated, Carrington is now considered as one of the vanguard, not only in histories of women artists but also Surrealism; her interests feminism, ecology and life-enhancing art are now shared by many. Challenging the conventions of her time, Carrington abandoned family, society and England to embrace new experiences and mix with artists in Europe and America, and to forge her own unique artistic style.
From Lancashire to London, Cornwall to France and Spain, then to Mexico, New York and finally back to Mexico, each place and interior became etched in her memory whether her grandmothers kitchen with its giant stove, Parisian cafés, a rural French hideaway, the sanatorium in Santander or her Mexican sanctuary only to be echoed, sometimes decades later, in her paintings and writings. Houses are really bodies, she wrote in her novella The Hearing Trumpet (1974), We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood streams.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Moorhead (The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington) chronicles in this illuminating biography the personal life and artistic evolution of surrealist painter and sculptor Leonora Carrington (1917–2011). Raised in an upper-class British family, Carrington resisted her parents' attempts to marry her off. Instead, she turned to art to explore her "interior reality," producing work that was symbolic rather than representational and depicted interactions between human and animal figures—particularly horses, which she "had drawn obsessively from a young age and saw as her alter ego." Among other episodes, Moorhead details Carrington's extended affair with painter Max Ernst when she was 20 and he was 46; her forced confinement to a sanitarium in early adulthood following a mental breakdown; her flight from Europe to New York City after WWII broke out; and her time, starting in 1942, making art and living on and off in Mexico City. Throughout, Moorhead draws on lucid analyses of Carrington's artwork, as well as conversations with the artist—a cousin of Moorhead's father—to illuminate who Carrington was "both as an artist and as a woman." The result is a revealing and accessible introduction to a noteworthy artist.