Leonora Carrington's Psychiatric Hospital Sketches Reunited at London's Freud Museum

An exhibition at London's Freud Museum presents rarely seen sketchbooks created by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington during her 1940 psychiatric hospitalization. Titled 'Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal,' this marks the first institutional London show dedicated to the British artist since 1991. The drawings were produced while Carrington was receiving treatment for a mental breakdown at a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, where she underwent Cardiazol shock therapy. Her doctor encouraged her to draw obsessively, resulting in works that reimagined the hospital as an underworld populated by hybrid creatures. These sketches include preparatory studies for her 1940 painting 'Down Below' and feature recurring equine imagery in unstable forms. The materials had been scattered across private collections for decades after being auctioned in 2004, following sixty years in collector Julien Levy's possession. Curator Vanessa Boni notes the drawings explore trauma and psychological dissolution, experiences often analyzed through Freudian psychoanalysis, though Carrington transformed her inner conflict into personal mythology. The exhibition places Carrington's work alongside antiquities from Sigmund Freud's collection, including an Egyptian statue of Anubis and horse figurines, highlighting shared themes of the underworld and psychological exploration. Boni emphasizes the charged context of displacement, as both Carrington and Freud experienced forced relocation due to World War II. The show runs through June 28 at the Freud Museum in Hampstead, London.