Victoria Cirlot: Leonora Through the Looking-Glass

As part of the Special: Garden of Hyenas, Victoria Cirlot opens the programme by exploring Leonora Carrington’s special relationship with animals. This bond meant animals played a significant role in her work, both in her painting and her writing.

The marvellous creatures that fill her paintings and stories call for a particular kind of understanding, which this talk will offer by linking them to a medieval tradition and by exploring the marvellous, an idea that coincided with Surrealism but has clear precedents in the work of Lewis Carroll, one of Carrington’s favourite authors. André Breton included both Carroll and Carrington in his Anthologie de l’humour noir (Anthology of Black Humour), in which he argued that the writers he selected produced black humour as a deep inner revolt, rejecting the surrounding world to make way for other, unknown worlds. And so talking zoo animals and monstrous hybrid beings living alongside ‘natural’ animals such as horses populate Leonora’s universe, pushing the usual anthropocentrism to the margins.

Victoria Cirlot is a linguist, historian, philologist, translator and professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, where she directs the University Institute of Culture. She is also editor of the El árbol del paraíso series at the publisher Siruela.

Duration: 60 minutes.

Capacity: 144 people.

Audience: General audience. Children aged 7 and over must be accompanied by an adult.

Tickets for this event will be available soon.