The exhibition, contested by Giulia Ingoma and Tere Arcq, is on paper to win: Finally, Italy offers a full recovery of the most beautiful, sophisticated artists of the 20th century. More than sixty works But there is something not to worry about the time: The exhibition opened only a few months after the great Milanese exhibition dedicated to Leonor Fichi, another critical figure but with many people in the Margins. It’s tempting to read this sequence as going back a long time – but also as a changing pattern, a sign that women have used surnearists to become the latest beauty trend, a collection of words worthy of kicking off a list.
A few years ago, these artists – Carrington, Fini, Hilma af Klint, Remedios Varto were everywhere: Their paintings were repeated, their stories were returned, their decorative bags. It’s nice to see them finally see, but the passion for art sometimes feels labored, even with makeup. There’s a fine line between recognition and Tokinism, and institutions still tend to cross over with well-meaning decorum. “Female Surrealist” has become a genre: something to rediscover, presented in a tone of reverence and Flaint Gloss.
That glitter is everywhere in the Palazzo Reale. This show takes place in six chapters: the beginning of a beautiful journey in life, the bride of the spirit, the submission, the journey of the heroine, the glorious black and the dark kitchen. They trace the artist’s life from the post-Victorian imagination of his youth to his years of alchemic wisdom in Mexico. The walls, painted in shades of cobalt, red and forest green, are draped with thin, almost translucent curtains. They don’t place the space so much as a veil that is a soft filter over Carrington’s unattainable power. It’s a good act, but one that takes a wild risk, hard to transform his vision into a decor.
The text of the exhibition asks visitors to rediscover Carrington as an important place of surrealism and the international avant-garde through metamorphosis, undoing and discovery. However, inside the rooms, it is the appearance that often gets attention. The walls are covered with beautifully printed quotes – some original, some in the frames glinting a little under the mirrors. They look almost like invented aphorisms, cracked in the “Museum Selfie Moment.” The risk is clear: To open a show of gravity such as the feeling of a sequence of organized rest areas where the visitor makes his enlightenment. The result, at times, feels less like a strictly historical art exhibition and more like a well-organized event: a molded landscape that hides the urgency and intensity of Carrington’s imagination.
And yet Carrington’s work refuses any kind of container. Moorhead’s grandmother’s kitchen . Elements (1946) Again Lovers (1987) Change love and nature charged, some exchange systems; A map of the human animal . Nothing about these jobs begs to be taken. They are aggressive, they are aggressive, there is no denying it.
Carrington, like Fini and AF Klint, there was no deception of the modern sign – he was there to remove. His practice broke down the hierarchies of human and animal, spirit and matter, male and female. His paintings are acts of rebellion disguised as ideas. However, usually, the curators are neutral in this over-explaining the biographical context: his relationship with Max Ernst, his decline, his discussion in Mexico. These structures are valid, but when they precede the work, they re-introduce too many managers in charge to extract. Male singers are their OEUURY; Women are told about their lovers, traumas and home lives. The label is punishing.
The trajectory of the show, in his childhood paintings like Sisters of the moon in esoteric maturity Sous la rose des vents (1955), following the spiritual evolution, the “heroine’s journey” which gives its title to one of the sections. It is here that the thesis of the exhibition emerges very well: Carrington redefines knowledge itself, from mythology to Gurdjieff, from Alchemy to Ecofeminism, from madness to mystical abjection. In the glowing blackness, his fascination with traditions – tarot, astrology, Cabala – is presented not as epistemology but as epistemology, a way of knowing the world through change.
The last stage, the alchemical kitchen, is perhaps the most deadly. To borrow Susan Aberth’s term, it brings back the kitchen – a place of women’s work, which demands confinement. Carrington’s fascination with the witches’ “market” of Mexico City, his experiments with tempera and egg yolk, his amazing, sparkling work: it all comes together here in Ars Combinatoria of the body and the cosmos. As Edward James once wrote, “his paintings are not just expressed – they are revealed.”
And yet, the realization of this reluctance to let the darkness do it all. Those thin curtains, the existing lighting, the writings on the walls – they soften the need to meet. They try to make her accessible, digestible, even photogenic. The result is a contradiction: a beautiful artist arranged in a gentle language. A revolution combined with velvet.
The woman’s true act would be to snatch him away – to allow Carrington’s dark luminosity without apology or mediation. His world does not need to be organized or defined; It needs to be dealt with. His work already holds the keys to the transformation the art world claims to be seeking.
Because this latest wave of exhibitions dedicated to women surrealists is both revolutionary and dangerous. In the end it gives them space, but it also tends to sanctify, to do “different” rather than to be designers of new designs. The next step is to integrate them not as signs of installation but as bases for another art history written in the margins inside.
Seeing Carrington’s paintings come together-Lovers, -We represent, Snake Bite Floripondio-Unforgettable experience: luminous, mysterious, mysterious, alive. The problem is not work; The outline. Recognition is not a revolution. Representation is not freedom. The Carriseton of the Revolution seen, where change is freedom, and freedom is knowledge, is still to come, shining beyond the next curtain.
So, let’s celebrate this new appearance of women surrealists, but let’s do the best, without marking the appearance of victory. Carrington did not paint to be fashionable; He drew to survive, to invent new ways of being. To honor him is not to mock him in a gauze-lit room with beautifully printed quotes, but to remove the veil and allow the veil and allow the canon itself. Until then, these shows will always be what they usually are: a respectful arrangement, a select rebellion with the same curtains.
“Leonora Carrington“On display in Pazazzo Reale, Milan, January 11, 2025.
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