A landmark event tied to the world of art and culture, has opened its doors to visitors in Milan – running from 20th of September, until 11th of January 2026. The first Italian exhibit dedicated solely to Leonora Carrington, at Palazzo Reale, celebrates the artist’ fantastic versatility whose vision largely spans on a plethora of creative branches : painting, literature and even theatre.

Who is Leonora Carrington?

This exhibition portrays the imaginative universe inside the mind of a surrealist and international avant-guard artist, Leonora Carrington. Her paintings are emotionally charged and express her deep feelings coming from her social exclusion. She was a woman, an immigrant, an exile, a mother, a survivor of violence. Carrington developed the idea of the journey as central to her vision of life: an odyssey in which travel is not only geographical but also metaphorical, through arcane knowledge, forgotten beliefs and heterodox forms of wisdom that sought to reposition women within history. The British artist was born in a bourgeois family which later through her career did not accept her creations, nevertheless she continued to paint. 

Throughout her career, she absorbed influences from Italian Renaissance paintings and Victorian literature to medieval alchemy and magic. This exhibition reveals not only the artist’s life journey, but also the themes that run through her work: trauma and introspection, family origins, uprooting, ancestral female figures and their own spaces, plus ecofeminism.

How myth seamlessly merges with the natural world

Through a multitude of paintings and manuscripts, visitors step into Leonora’s inventive and vivid landscape. One that’s profoundly shaped by mythology, spirituality, and ecology  – all essential themes conveying the pillar of the artist’ creative vision. Simultaneously, the exhibit accentuates her connection to Italian culture – initiated during her studies of Renaissance art. It also further extends upon her complex cultural identity, marked by her Celtic ancestry, post-Victorian influences and keen interest in Surrealism.

More explicitly, these elements perfectly fuse in two of Leonora’s most dreamlike masterpieces, shown below. Both unfold across glowing landscapes, haunted by enchanted forests, spectral shadows, and mythological creatures. In these images, it’s almost as if the artist is breathing life into forgotten legends that bridge the gap between nature, fantasy and her memory – where real or invented beings coexist with flora and fauna.

Style & thematic ground

Leonora Carrington’s painting practice defies easy categorisation: she operated within the sphere of Surrealism, yet she brought her own singular language of myth, alchemy, transformation and feminism. Her works are populated by hybrid beings: animals that morph into humans, objects that seem to breathe, interiors that open onto other worlds. Her childhood fascination with Celtic mythology and equestrian freedom, her adult immersion in alchemical, occult, and Mexican-surreal traditions all coalesced into a visual world in which the boundaries of identity, species, gender and space blur.

Alchemy, domestic rituals and the occult

Leonora Carrington regarded ordinary spaces like kitchens, gardens, interiors as rich with possibility, metamorphosis and hidden power. This shows in her paintings where familiar domestic objects sit alongside symbols of mysticism, eggs, birds, pots, cauldrons and chimera-like figures. In this way Carrington’s picture-planes become rituals or dream-scapes, not mere representations. In these areas, there are mystical characters depicted in strange spatial positions and behaving in an uncommon manner.

A boundless passion for magic

The avant-garde artist drew multiple schemes that showed her mathematical and scientific inner self. She sketched on paper macabre and somewhat witchy worldviews. Therefore, she made maps full of symbols, arrows that connect concepts. In addition, she created her own cards with her characters and their functions, such as; the magician, the devil and the tower.

_{Featured image by Giselle Salvadori (Ph)}