Leonora Carrington

(Clayton Green, Lancashire, 1917 – Mexico City, 2011)

The Sphere Themselves

1965

oil on canvas

80 x 60 cm

Inv. no. CAB012

BBVA Collection Mexico



Exhaustive, precise and hallucinatory, Carrington’s works are never trivial. Her practice, subtended by a spiritual quest, started with the surrealist movement and ended up in Mexico, where the Maya and Aztec past, the cult of the dead and shamanism resonated with the culture Carrington had absorbed in her country of origin.

With the passing of time, Leonora Carrington would readily ascribe to the most outlandish paranormal and oneiric phenomena, and her practice acquired a cryptic dimension, attenuated by refined execution rendered in an almost précieux style. She engaged in the automatic writing championed by André Breton, and drew from religions and myths, from anthropology and occultism, from Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, I Ching, Buddhism, tarot, as well as from fairy tales and fantasy literature.

What secret ceremony is the Mother Goddess in The Sphere Themselves about to officiate? Surely a fertility ritual. Leonora Carrington never concealed her feminist and environmentalist convictions. Her iconography questioned archaic religions prior to the patriarchy, the mystic and hermetic traditions, and Celtic legends, and often resorted to medieval bestiaries as well as Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift and Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

This work presents a wide variety of archetypes. In an underground temple, the painting depicts a priestess covered with a terrifying mask, about to descend a staircase to her sacred space to meet with the profane silhouette of a man. The mysterious setting responds to an extreme coding of the elements. The sphere in the title refers to perfection, to all the possibilities posed by a limited world, to the abolition of time and space, to the cosmic egg, to the cyclic movement of renewal, and to revolution. The woman could incarnate Nyx, the name given by the Greeks to the Goddess of Night and Darkness, the daughter of Chaos. In some of the motifs used in the composition we can recognise the spiral symbolising the forces underlying creation, as well as evolution and self-transformation; a flimsy lemniscate signifying infinity, eternity, and spiritual powers; the ignis fatuus representing warmth, sexual energy, transcendence.