|
Surreal Friends Surreal Friends is the book that, at last, admirers of Leonora Carrington & Remedios Varo have been waiting for. Anyone interested in their magical world now has the book that unlocks the wanderings of the Surreal mind ... more
Remedios Varos Prints @ ebay.com (direct link to prints) For me as for many others, Carrington is one the greatest artists of the 20th-century. Now in her early 90s, with Dorothea Tanning she is the last living link to the Surrealists. Reading the above article made me realise just how poorly Britain treats its great visionaries. Someone like Tracey Emin (the Katie Price of British art, non?) is treated with reverence and yet Leonora is half-forgotten by many including the Tate who don't even own one of her oils. How on earth can that be right? So it's not the Tate who publishes this book nor any major institution. In France, for example, I bet a major exhibition at Centre Pompidou would have happened years ago. Not in the UK. It's left to individual such as Joanna and Pallant House in Chichester to produce a major exhibition of her work plus this beautiful book.
In Mexico City she found herself liberated from her English upper-class background and from the expectations of the older male Surrealists of whose circle she had been a part in Paris and New York. She made new friendships - with Varo and Horna especially, but also with other refugees from war-torn Europe and with Mexican artists and writers including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Octavio Paz. Remedios Varo arrived in Mexico City in 1941, having fled Nazi-occupied Paris with her lover, the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret. Until her early death in 1963, she produced a wealth of paintings inspired by the spirit and freedom of Mexico, in which magic, humour and illusion feature strongly. Kati Horna was born in Hungary and moved to Paris to pursue a career as a photographer. With her husband Jose Horna she documented the Spanish Civil War, before moving with him to Mexico City in 1939. In Mexico she became a photojournalist for various newspapers and also took on more personal photography projects, much of this work suffused with a Surrealist thread.
Remedios Varos Prints @ ebay.com (direct link to prints) For all three women, Mexico offered freedom to explore their art in ways that had not been possible in Europe. "Surreal Friends" tells the fascinating story of their artistic friendship.
Remedios Varos Prints @ ebay.com (direct link to prints) The death of Leonora Carrington was announced on the 26th May 2011. More info. can be found here. Tributes and images of her work can be found here.
Remedios Varos Prints @ ebay.com (direct link to prints) |
(UK) | 
(US)