This show brings together a group of works by Leonora Carrington produced around the same time as Ethiops (1964). Created in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, these works reflect a period in which the artist had already developed a highly personal and forward-looking artistic language, one that departed decisively from European art of the first half of the twentieth century. During these years, Carrington pursued sustained inquiries into feminism and environmental concerns, while also engaging with non-Western thought and artistic traditions, among other subjects. Some of the works included here come into dialogue with the exceptional painting of 1965, while others point to distinct aspects of Carrington’s practice during this period, as well as to broader concerns that run throughout her oeuvre. The selection foregrounds the radical nature of her formal experimentation, linking it to her pictorial production while also underscoring her interest in and development of a multidisciplinary practice. In these years, Carrington participated in numerous projects that encompassed mural painting, illustration and editorial work, as well as costume design for theater and cinema.

Several of the works on view, like Ethiops, reflect Carrington’s interest in reconfiguring prevailing systems of classification among species through the depiction of fantastic, mythic, or unknown beings. This impulse is evident, for example, in two ink drawings: one portraying a quadruped with a fish’s tail, the other a centaur encountering a woman. Similarly, the artist projects an imaginative universe that proposes a new model of interspecies relations, one that stands apart from any instrumental logic. As Susan L. Aberth has observed, “animals are seen as equal players in the context of life on Earth, not as secondary life forms—pets, food, or property.”

The spatial configuration of Ethiops reveals Carrington’s interest in the scenic and the narrative. This interest manifested itself in ways that extended beyond the purely visual. From an early stage in her career, the artist participated actively in projects related to theater and cinema. In Mexico, this became more noticeable during and after the 1950s, when Carrington collaborated with directors such as Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juan López Moctezuma. In the exhibition, her interest in the scenic is represented by the design of one of the costumes she created for Del amor, a production conceived by the writer Max Aub. Subandhu (1959) presents another costume that once again refers to an animal motif. The exhibition also includes two striking masks by the artist. The mask was a recurring motif in Carrington’s production, as well as in that of other artists in her orbit, such as Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. Notably, Carrington and Horna collaborated on a series of images in which the mask plays a central role: the photographs Oda a la necrofilia (1962), taken by Horna and published in S.nobmagazine.

Carrington’s work sought to question hegemonic concepts and the logic of modern rationality by drawing, among other sources, on non-Western cultures. This approach is evident in her production of the 1960s, including Ethiops, as well as in what is widely regarded as the most significant work of that decade—and one of the most important in her entire body of work: the mural Mito y religión de los mayas de las tierras altas(widely known as El mundo mágico de los mayas), which she executed between 1963 and 1964 for the Museo Nacional de Antropología. As Tere Arcq has observed, “the fantastic figures that populate this work—a syncretic combination of Carrington’s imagination, the Celtic world, and the Maya world—sometimes derive directly from the Popol Vuh. At other times, they are inspired by local culture and myth.” In order to carry out this work, the artist relocated to Chiapas, where she lived and worked for much of 1963.

The exhibition includes five preparatory drawings for this outstanding heritage work. Two are dedicated to communities in the Chiapas Highlands, and within this context the exhibition also presents a complex and detailed drawing depicting the church of San Juan Chamula, a motif that reappears in the mural. Another drawing revisits an entity that appears in Mito y religión de los mayas de las tierras altas. Carrington’s striking representation of the Totilme’il, an inhabitant of the highest level of the cosmos, conceives a hybrid being that reconciles opposing elements, such as the sun and the moon. Finally, the exhibition includes one of the rare studies that encompass the mural in its entirety. Although preliminary, this image already contains much of what would later appear in the final version. Executed in San Cristóbal de las Casas on a Sunday in 1963, this schematic and synthetic image offers a unique insight into the artist’s working process. It includes, for example, annotations pointing to elements she would later seek to integrate into the mural, such as weaving or basketry, domestic animals, and ceramics.

Taken together, these works allow viewers to consider the continuing relevance and contemporary resonance of Leonora Carrington’s production, research, and formal approaches. Her work of the 1960s, as is well known, inspired various feminist and environmental collectives and initiatives, and her practice is now considered by specialists to be a precursor to ecofeminism. Although her work would later become more reflective in different ways, she never abandoned her distinctive sense of humor or her use of strategies such as juxtaposition in order to question established orders and imaginaries. As a whole, these works also speak to the place that local culture and Mexico City occupied in her work during the second half of the twentieth century, from the development of research and approaches to local issues, to public art initiatives, collaborative circuits, and participation in communities connected by shared affinities.

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—Daniel Garza Usabiaga

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