The Freud Museum stages the first London solo exhibition of Leonora Carrington in over three decades

One of the surrealist art movement’s most compelling figures, British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington is best known for her painterly dreamscapes, featuring fantastical quasi-human forms, both cosmic and horrific. Her latest exhibition, Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal, at the Freud Museum marks the first time her paintings have been displayed in London for 35 years.

Told through Carrington’s sketchbook drawings and letters from 1938 to 1941, the exhibition traces her escape from Nazi-occupied France, following the arrest of her lover, the German surrealist Max Ernst, to her hospitalisation in Peña Castillo sanatorium in Santander, Spain. During this time, she suffered a mental breakdown that sent her spiralling into severe psychosis, prompting doctors to subject Carrington – then 23 years old – to brutal Cardiazol shock therapy, while encouraging her to draw her experiences obsessively. Several of her works, most notably the seminal painting Down Below (1940), reflect on her psychic disintegration, also chronicled in her memoir of the same name: ‘I didn’t know where I was going. This seems to be a recurring thing in my life. I think it’s death practice.’

Giving form to her experience through alchemical and underworldly symbolism, the works see Carrington imagine herself as a cadaver, transforming the hospital into the world of the dead, with a lavish and masked cast of non-human characters drawn from myth, folklore, religious rituals and the occult. The exhibition is accompanied by extracts from Carl Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, which greatly influenced Carrington’s work. Juxtaposed alongside the works are antiquities from Freud’s personal collection, such as an ancient Egyptian statue of Anubis – the half-human, half-dog deity of the afterlife – and several horse statuettes, an acknowledgement of Carrington’s horse alter ego and both individuals’ shared interest in the transformative properties of death and the unconscious realms of experience.

A deeply personal portrait of transformation, Carrington’s Santander sketchbooks depict her profound journey through the subterranean world of her psyche, culminating in her reincarnation as a hybrid and quixotic being: ‘an androgyne, the Moon, the Holy Ghost, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora Carrington, and a woman,’ as she writes in Down Below. Through this interconnected lens, themes of death and rebirth are reimagined as sites of potential, where the metaphysical dimensions of experience present an intimate understanding of otherness in all its shapeshifting forms. B

Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal is showing until 28 June 2026 at the Freud Museum London