Lehmann Maupin Pairs Leonora Carrington With Cecilia Vicuña

Lehmann Maupin will open "Leonora Carrington & Cecilia Vicuña" in New York on November 19, pairing the Surrealist painter with the Chilean artist and poet in a two-part exhibition staged jointly with Gallery Wendi Norris. The second part follows at Norris's San Francisco gallery in January, marking the first time the two artists' work has been positioned together in this way.

The galleries built distinct checklists for each venue, scaled to their different spaces, with some overlap between the two parts. New works by Vicuña will hang alongside historical pieces by Carrington, who died in 2011 at 94.

How did the show come about?

Dealer Wendi Norris proposed the exhibition to Rachel Lehmann, cofounder of Lehmann Maupin, several years ago. The idea resurfaced after Lehmann visited Vicuña's solo show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) last November. That exhibition was co-organized with Whitechapel Gallery in London, where a version of it opened last week.

"Things sometimes take time until they sit in the right place," Lehmann said, adding that pairing artists in new ways is central to her gallery's program.

Norris began representing Carrington in 2004, seven years before the artist's death. She has placed Carrington's work in intergenerational group shows and staged reenactments of her plays, but this is her first exhibition pairing Carrington's art with a living contemporary artist.

"I love putting Leonora Carrington's work in new context," Norris told ARTnews. "One thing I feel I can say very certainly is that she would be overwhelmingly excited about an exhibition like this."

What connects the two artists?

The relationship runs deeper than stylistic affinity. In 1969, Vicuña, then in her early 20s, met Carrington in Mexico City while returning to Chile from New York, where Vicuña had "a vision [of] the painting that I needed to do." Carrington gave her advice that helped transfer that vision to canvas, a process Vicuña called Calcomanías. The IMMA exhibition explored that meeting.

"Carrington enables this transfer from the poetry of the very unusual or uncategorized forms into something which was very tangible, like a painting," Lehmann said.

New works by Vicuña include Polvo del Sahara/Saharan Desert Dust (2026), an underwater scene in which light reflects into the ocean's depths and a stone staircase leads beyond the horizon. The New York chapter will also show two Carrington works last seen in the city in her 1990 show at the Brewster Gallery, including Eye Witness (1987), a wintry landscape featuring a skyscraper resembling the Empire State Building.

Norris described the checklist-building as "an iterative process" guided by "Leonora's love of the environment, her sense of humor, and her hybrid creatures and how that might speak to some of the similarities we see in Cecilia's work."

Why now?

Both artists appeared in the 2022 Venice Biennale, titled "The Milk of Dreams" after a Carrington book, and Vicuña received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement that year — but in separate sections, never side by side. Carrington's work is also the subject of two current traveling surveys, one that opened at the Palazzo Reale di Milano in 2025 and another on view at the Faro Santander in Spain.

"This has been a long time coming for artists like Leonora and Cecilia," Norris said. "She knew she was planting seeds, and they were going to bear fruit one day." The two-part exhibition now gives audiences on both coasts the first sustained look at what those seeds produced.