Rare sketches by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, created during her 1940 confinement in a Spanish psychiatric hospital, have been reunited and are on display at London's Freud Museum. The exhibition, "Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal," features sketchbooks that reimagined the hospital as a mythological underworld and served as preparatory studies for her seminal painting Down Below.
The show is significant as it is the first institutional London exhibition dedicated to Carrington since 1991 and reunites long-scattered private collection items for the first time in over two decades. It explores the intersection of trauma, creativity, and psychoanalysis, placing Carrington's deeply personal, symbolic work in dialogue with Sigmund Freud's antiquities collection and theories, while also highlighting her resistance to straightforward Freudian interpretation.