Press Contact Wendi Norris Frey Norris Gallery Annex T: 415.346.7812 wendi@freynorris.

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Leonora Carrington: The Talismanic Lens

February 7 March 30, 2008
First American exhibition of this iconic Surrealist painter in nearly 10 years. Over 25 paintings and works on paper from 1935 to 1987. 54-page catalogue with essays by Ara H. Merjian, Stanford scholar, and Gabriel Weisz Carrington, writer and artists son. San Francisco Art Institute to host academic forum dedicated to art and legacy of Carrington on February 6th in SFAIs auditorium.

Quera ser Pjaro, Oil on canvas, 119 x 90 cm (46 x 35 in), 1960

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. Frey Norris Gallery presents The Talismanic Lens, the result of a five
year endeavor of collecting, studying and getting to know Leonora Carrington, one of the last surviving Surrealist artists and writers. It has been almost ten years since such a major collection of her work has been on display (her last solo exhibition in California was at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco in 1991). Our exhibition and its accompanying 54-page catalogue commemorate the 90th year since Carringtons birth and this nonagenarian plans to travel with her family to attend the exhibition opening.
Only a comprehensive retrospective could do justice to the breadth of Carringtons output, encompassing as it does an astonishing range of media and materials: lithographs, temperas, oils, watercolors, gouaches, tapestries, etchings, graphite drawings, polychrome sculpture, bronze sculpture, masks And these works, in turn, merit juxtaposition with the artists closely related literary corpus, including numerous short stories, poems, plays, novels, and novellas. Still, the present show offers a representative if humble selection of Carringtons oeuvre, from the early 1940s to the late 1980s. Ara H. Merjian, Stanford scholar and art historian

The English born Carrington has oft been noted for her dramatic and compelling life story. Born at the close of World War I, from early childhood until today, she naturally gravitated to the occultto practices such as alchemy, esoteric religious rituals and witchcraft. In her early 20s, she left an aristocratic family and fortune in England to live in Paris with a much older and married Max Ernst. In 1941 she suffered a nervous breakdown in Santander, Spain only to blossom as an artist in the unparalleled intellectual community of New York during the war; here Surrealist exiles and Abstract Expressionists were radically reconfiguring the nature of art and the future of art history. In 1943 Carrington settled in Mexico with the post-revolutionary writers, poets and artists, among them Benjamin Peret, Wolfgang Paalen and Remedios Varo. In the sixty-five years since, Carrington has produced an overwhelmingly rich oeuvre that encompasses paintings, murals, set design, poetry, novels and seemingly nonsensical essays in the classic Surrealist tradition.

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Carringtons path in life has certainly informed her paintings, but it is her paintings as repositories of her knowledge, imagination and yearnings that illuminate a world that is entirely and distinctly her own. Her work is a visual and literary adventure populated by miraculous transformations and mixtures of human, animal and vegetal ritualistic actors. In the exhibition catalogue, Ara H. Merjian, Stanford scholar and art historian, contextualizes Leonora Carringtons artperhaps the first scholar to approach and posit art historical theories based on her work (as opposed to her life). Carringtons elder son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington, invents a playful narrative, done with the cooperation and much to the amusement of his mother, alongside the paintings included in the exhibition catalogue.

San Francisco Art Institute Roundtable

On February 6th, 2008, The San Francisco Art Institute will host the first roundtable forum dedicated to the art work and the legacy of renowned Surrealist artist and author, Leonora Carrington (b. 1917). The roundtable will begin at 5:30 in SFAIs auditorium followed by a reception in the Diego Rivera Gallery. Confirmed roundtable participants include Whitney Chadwick, Professor of Art at San Francisco State University and noted scholar of feminist art history; Susan Aberth, an art historian from Bard University and Carrington scholar; and Ara Merjian, Stanford Professor of modern art and architectural history and theory. The discussion will be hosted and moderated by Lynn Hershmann Leeson, filmmaker, artist and newly-appointed Chair of SFAIs film department.

About the Art

The exhibition will include eleven oil paintings, several gouaches and watercolors, and a few drawings spanning nearly forty five years of her career. The Talismanic Lens refers most directly to the first two works in the exhibitiontwo gouaches Untitled (1942) and La Nave Espacial (1943). These two works bookend Carringtons arrival in New York and further migration to Mexico City, and likely served a talismanic purpose in helping to heal and protect her battered psyche. These two pieces perhaps best illustrate the seemingly unfamiliar yet shockingly contemporary nature of Carringtons work. The largest oil painting in the show is the 1960 Quera ser pjaro, a commission executed for Maria Felix, the late actress and Mexican celebrity icon. The painting, a very rare portrait of Maria Felixs son, Enrique, depicts the young man encircled by a menagerie of fantastical animals, casting an alchemical incantation over a giant spinning egg as he slowly transforms himself into a bird. Le Bon Roi Dagobert (1948), a painting that the artist gave to her dear friend, the Spanish Surrealist film-maker Luis Buuel, will be included in its first public exhibition as it has been with Buuel and his family for more than 50 years. Two of Carringtons most familiar worksDarvault (c. 1950), the cover from the recently published Carrington book, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art by Bard College professor and art scholar Susan Aberth, and Are You Really Syrious (1953) illustrate the compositional variety and narrative tensions in Carringtons paintingspart Hieronymus Bosch, a hint of Breughel and Archimboldo and perhaps presaging artists like Yoshitomo Nara (on several occasions, Carringtons major works have found an eager audience in traveling exhibitions through Japan). Due to the amount of material and the anticipated popularity of this exhibition, it will be installed in Frey Norris Gallerys 2,000 square foot ground floor space (which is ordinarily dedicated to the contemporary gallerys programming).

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About Frey Norris Gallery Annex

Unlike many galleries that deal broadly in the secondary market, the Frey Norris Gallery Annex is highly specialized. The Annex focuses on the underappreciated careers of many important Surrealist artists and thinkers, and contains the finest collection of art for sale in the United States by the women artists associated with Surrealism.

Frey Norris Gallery 456 Geary Street San Francisco, CA 94102 T: 415.346.7812 www.freynorris.com

Gallery Hours Tuesday Saturday 11 a.m. 7 p.m. Sunday 11 a.m. 5 p.m. Closed Monday

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