Leonora Carrington: What if the Impossible Wasn’t Impossible?

Please tell me I’m not the only one who completely lost their mind when first reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. A man wakes up as a gigantic insect and somehow, that’s simply the reality we’re supposed to accept. Nobody really explains what happened or tries to make it make sense. I remember finding it completely absurd at first, but once I stopped applying the rules of reality, I had known my whole life, something about it became strangely liberating.

Although Kafka wasn’t a Surrealist per se, first encountering this kind of absurdity probably initiated why I later fell in love with the movement. Instead of asking whether something could happen, you could start wondering what happens once you accept that it simply does. Ask yourself: What if a human doesn’t have to remain entirely human, a dream entirely separate from reality, or the impossible actually impossible?

If you’re having the same thoughts, let me introduce you to Leonora Carrington’s work. Because, more than a century after the British artist was born, Leonora Carrington: The Art of Transmutation opens at Almine Rech’s Turenne space in Paris on September 8th, marking her first solo exhibition and bringing together works from across her career.

Looking at Carrington’s paintings, I remember exactly what drew me to this type of art in the first place. Humans meet animals, gender becomes ambiguous, horses, birds, hyenas and hybrid creatures appear in worlds where mythology, nature and reality exist alongside each other. No wonder then that Carrington was a leading figure of international Surrealism, the movement that emerged in the 1920s around the unconscious, dreams and the rejection of purely rational thought – just to put a little Surrealism 101 out there. What distinguishes Carrington’s work is where she took that freedom herself, creating a visual world shaped by alchemy, Celtic mythology, tarot, spiritual traditions and, later, her life in Mexico.

As so often, the title of the exhibition in Paris, already gives away what connects all these influences, although the word itself might need some explaining: Transmutation means one thing changing completely into another form or substance, which is almost suspiciously fitting here. Carrington’s beings change form and the lines between different worlds begin to blur: human and animal, female and male, visible and invisible, dream and matter are no longer clear opposites.

Just like the complex worlds she created, Carrington’s own reality was anything but simple: Fleeing the war in Europe, she reached the American continent in 1941 before permanently settling in Mexico City, where she lived for the rest of her life. There, Indigenous cosmologies and Mexican popular traditions became part of an imagination already shaped by her British roots, Celtic mythology, alchemy and tarot. As these influences started to overlap, so did different ideas of time, allowing past, present and future to coexist as freely as the creatures populating her paintings.

So how does that translate onto the canvas? In one scene, red and blue figures sit opposite each other on a bed, surrounded by hooded people, a passing bird, a snake and several animals, and somehow, none of it seems particularly strange, it simply belongs there. Trying to decode every creature and strange encounter almost misses the fun of it. So consequently, the artist asks us to accept multiple, sometimes contradictory realities at once. Sounds familiar, right? Dalí gave Surrealism melting clocks, Magritte put a train inside a fireplace, whereas Carrington seems less interested in placing one impossible thing into a recognisable reality than in changing its rules altogether.

As many artists, she didn’t keep those ideas contained within one medium either. She drew, sculpted, designed costumes and jewellery, created tapestries and masks, worked in theatre and wrote literature. In bronze sculptures she found a true companion, where her transformations became physical: a reptile carries four smaller heads on its back, while another figure has a recognisably human body topped by a face that is anything but. You recognize the pattern, right?

What’s striking is how little of this feels stuck in the 20th century. Long before ecological, feminist and posthumanist questions entered contemporary debates, Carrington was already challenging divisions between human and non-human, female and male, nature and culture. Women in her work weren’t simply there to be looked at either, instead appeared as witches, goddesses and figures with their own rights.

So, in a way, it’s no surprise her work has undergone such a strong rediscovery in Europe over the past decades. In 2022, Cecilia Alemani borrowed the title of Carrington’s book The Milk of Dreams for the 59th Venice Biennale, where metamorphosis, bodies and changing definitions of the human became central questions. Technically Surrealism as a historical movement belongs to another century, clearly Carrington manages to defy time – and not only in her art.

Thinking back to Gregor Samsa, I’m not sure his transformation is even the strange part anymore, considering how desperately we initially want an explanation for it. Carrington makes us question exactly that need: Is it finally time to enter a world where human, animal, real or imaginary were never strict either-or questions in the first place? Perhaps that’s why her work still feels so important, because we encounter odd, irrational and completely unexpected things all the time, yet somehow, we’re obsessed with making sense of them. In doing exactly the opposite, she gave the strange room to exist. Spending enough time with her art makes me want to broaden my own rational reality. And really, wouldn’t life be terribly boring if everything made perfect sense?

Leonora Carrington: The Art of Transmutation is on view at Almine Rech, Paris, from September 8 until October 10, 2026.