Leonora Carrington, ‘The Dancer’ (El Bailarín), 2011 

Leonora Carrington, The Dancer (El Bailarín), 2011  

Bronze, cire perdue. Edition 8/10. Presented by rossogranada 

About the Work

The figure of The Dancer firstly appears in Leonora Carrington’s paintings in the 1950s, specifically in the painting of 1954 titled Figuras Míticas, Dancer II. Preparatory work on the Dancer as a supplementary character can be seen in the upper right corner of the 1953 painting And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur! where a faint human-like character is seemingly dancing in the same pose as The Dancer.

André Breton in L’art magique (1957), captures the energy of such mythical creatures and compositions, largely inspired by his admiration for Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights: ‘This is the desire of the inhabitants of the Garden … I would like to have wings, a shell, bark; breathe smoke, have an elephant’s trunk, twist my body, be divided into many parts, be in everything, emanate like an aroma, develop like a plant, pour like water, vibrate like sound, shine like light, curl up under all forms, penetrate each atom…’

About the Artist

Leonora Carrington (b. 1917, Clayton Green; d. 2011, Mexico City) is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century and a captivating and enigmatic figure of the surrealist art movement. Articulated by recurrent motifs – including hybrid animals, landscapes and fictive characters, feminism, ecology and the mystical – Carrington’s oeuvre employs a variety of genres, media and materials and plays upon the powers of challenging conventions, memory, fantasy, and freedom.

Carrington’s artistic compositions were deeply intertwined with her tumultuous life experiences. Fleeing the family expectations imposed on her as a young society woman in early 20th-century England, Carrington forged her own independent path within the surrealist movement in France, an influence she later carried with her to Mexico. Her art became a vessel for introspection and independence, a medium through which she navigated the complexities of identity, mythology and the arcane.

Carrington started working in sculpture at the age of 21, when she was living with Max Ernst in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in the South of France. Her earliest documented sculpture is Horsehead from 1938. In 1942, Carrington fled France to Mexico to escape the war, and continued with her sculptural experimentations, mainly working in wood as well as cotton, linen and gypsum, in works commissioned by her friend and patron of surrealist art, Edward James.

In 1986, in New York, Carrington produced her first bronze cast sculpture, a direction she followed exclusively from 1994 until her death in 2011. This project of 36 pieces culminated in the monumental crocodile sculpture that is sited on the grand avenue of Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. Currently, there is only one of her bronze sculptures in Europe, in the collection of the Maison André Breton in the South of France. 

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^{Main image: Leonora Carrington, The Dancer, 2011. ‘Leonora Carrington’ at Theaterplatz in Basel, June 2024. © rossogranada}