Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington was a British-born Mexican Surrealist painter and writer known for densely symbolic, dreamlike paintings populated by hybrid human-animal figures, alchemical imagery, and references to Celtic mythology and esoteric traditions. After fleeing Europe amid the Second World War and a period of psychiatric hospitalization following the internment of her partner Max Ernst, she settled permanently in Mexico City, where she became a central figure, alongside Remedios Varo, of the Surrealist circle that developed there. Carrington's paintings, including The Giantess and Self-Portrait, along with her novels and short stories, drew on her own psychological experience and a deep personal mythology largely independent of the male-dominated European Surrealist movement she had left behind, and she is now recognized as one of the movement's most significant artists.