Where and when
Leonora Carrington a journey into the twentieth century. From the surrealist dream to the magic of Mexico
Presentation of the book by Giulia Ingarao published by Mimesis Edizioni – Art and Critics Series. The author in dialogue with Davide Lacagnina (art historian, University of Siena) and Angela Sanna (art historian and curator, Academy of Fine Arts of Brera-Milan).
The volume, the result of ten years of research between Europe, the United States and Latin America, tells the life and works of Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), a visionary and eclectic artist, protagonist of the history of twentieth century art. The only woman of the surrealist group able to stand up to Breton, she embodied the two archetypes of the feminine: femme enfant and femme sorcière.
After the tormented love story with Max Ernst, the madness and the escape from the asylum, the artist of English origin settles first in New York, where he attends the Arts of this Century gallery directed by Peggy Guggenheim, and then in Mexico . Mexican culture nourishes his creativity by stimulating the creation of an iconographic and literary universe populated by mythological and fantastic figures in which profound knowledge of the Italian Renaissance, the symbolic forms of surrealism and studies on esotericism and alchemy are mixed.
The book illustrates training in Europe, the encounter with Surrealism and the long life in Mexico, where Leonora Carrington ended her life in 2011 and where the author attended her at her home in Mexico City. The documented events are enriched with accurate interpretations of the works and biographical anecdotes (the meeting with Picasso, the friendship with, among others, Luis Buñuel, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Octazio Paz).
Carrington is today considered one of the greatest Mexican and surrealist artists, her production is extraordinarily vast and ranges from painting, sculpture, literature, applied arts, scenography and theater.
Giulia Ingarao
Critic and historian of art, she earned her PhD from the University of Palermo and specialized at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has published numerous essays, many of them on the surrealist diaspora in Mexico. He is a professor of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo.
Davide Lacagnina
(Palermo, 1978) he earned a PhD in Art History at the University of Palermo and specialized in History of Contemporary Art at the University of Siena. He attended the postgraduate courses in museology and cultural heritage management of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the Ecole du Louvre and carried out research activities at Italian and foreign universities and institutes. He has taught at the Universities of Palermo, Enna and Catania, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo and at the School of Specialization in Historical and Artistic Heritage of the University of Siena. Since 2013 he has been serving as a fixed-term researcher at the University of Siena.
Angela Sanna
(Québec, 1964) he is professor of Contemporary Art History at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan. Ph.D in Art History (Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), has to his credit numerous researches and publications oriented on several aspects of modern and contemporary art, from the relations between Milan and Paris in the second postwar period to the work of Enrico Baj and the post-surrealist movement Phases, from Futurism to the poetic writings of Breton, Baj, Fontana. He has collaborated with museums and galleries, including the Pompidou Center, the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art and the Siviero Museum in Florence, of which he has published, among other things, the catalogs of works from the 1300s to the 1900s. He has curated and / or presented various exhibitions of contemporary artists.