"While being treated for a serious mental breakdown in 1940, Carrington passed her days by filling sketchbooks with art that reimagined the hospital as an 'underworld' inhabited by strange, hybrid beasts."
"Luis Morales, the doctor who administered this treatment, also encouraged Carrington to draw obsessively during her stay. Several works of art, as well as a memoir published in 1972, reflect on this experience of being trapped 'down below.'"
"As is typical of her oeuvre, Carrington used symbolism from the occult, mythology, and tarot to probe the depths of her psyche and process a time that she later described as 'very much like having been dead.'"
Leonora Carrington's sketches created during her 1940 psychiatric hospital stay are on display in London. These works reimagine the hospital as an underworld filled with hybrid beasts. The exhibition at the Freud Museum reunites her art and letters from this period, marking the first institutional show in London since 1991. Carrington's mental health struggles, including psychosis and brutal treatments, influenced her art, which often incorporates symbolism from the occult and mythology, reflecting her psychological depths and experiences of confinement.
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