The first institutional exhibition dedicated to Leonora Carrington's wartime drawings from her Santander sketchbooks (1938-1941). Features the seminal painting Down Below (1940), produced during Carrington's hospitalization in Santander after fleeing Nazi-occupied France — never before exhibited in London. The show places Carrington's recurring motifs of horses and the underworld in dialogue with Sigmund Freud's own collection of antiquities devoted to these themes. A rare intersection of two minds that never met but shared obsessions.
Why We Love This
The Freud Museum is the perfect venue for this — Carrington's work was explicitly engaged with psychoanalysis and the unconscious, and placing her wartime drawings alongside Freud's actual collection of antiquities creates a conversation that no other institution could host. The sketchbooks from 1938-1941 document an artist processing trauma through Surrealism in real time. For collectors tracking the Surrealism market revival, Carrington's prices have risen steadily since her 2023 retrospective at Tate Liverpool.