Leonora Carrington was a British-born surrealist artist. She was the young lover of Max Ernst in the 1930s. They lived in Paris and the South of France. When storm clouds loomed over Europe she headed across the Atlantic, settling eventually in Mexico City. She was an artist and creative talent of genius. She painted, sketched and designed.

In May 2015 Tate Liverpool hosted a superb display of her work, revealing giant canvases, strange, exotic creatures and powerful female images of fertility. Carrington was a writer, poet and artist. A creative thinker of tremendous versatility.

In the 1960s she was commissioned to create a mural for the entrance to the National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City. A magnificent feat of imagination entitled ‘The Magical World of the Maya’. I was lucky enough to see this mural in Liverpool in 2015. It was the first time it had left Mexico.

You can read more about Leonora here: Leonora Carrington – Surrealist artist

• All photos by: www.petercorcoran.com
• Words and curation: www.greyhoundtrainers.com
• These paintings were on public display at Tate Liverpool in 2015 – www.tate.org.uk
• The paintings are from museums, galleries and some private collections
• A note on ‘The Magical World of the Maya’ ……..

*** In 1963 Leonora Carrington was invited to create a mural-sized painting for the Maya Ethnography room at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. El mundo mágico de los mayas (1964) portrays the humans, gods, and spirits that inhabit the sacred space of the modern Maya. Carrington spent six months in Chiapas – in the town of San Cristobal de Chiapas to try to absorb and assimilate Mayan myth and legend. She created an exceptional and amazingly original mural ***

• April 2021
• May 2021