The story of "the most successful female artist in UK history"

Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary runs until October 26, bringing together a wide selection of Carrington’s work across a range of media, from paintings and lithographs through sketches and sculpture to tapestries and jewellery.

Nicola Jones​​​​, chief executive Newlands House Gallery, said: “For many years, Carrington’s eventful life story - especially her love affair with Max Ernst, her decision as a young woman to abandon both her family and England and her spell in a Spanish asylum - have been central to discussions of her work.

“The show at Newlands House Gallery, however, will look beyond her story and celebrate Carrington (1917-2011) for the broad range of her work, focusing particularly on her later years. Although she is best known in the UK as a painter and as a writer, she created art across a wide range of different disciplines – and this exhibition will bring together many examples of that. Loans, which are coming from Mexico and the UK, include a wall of masks; a series of masks made for a theatrical production of The Tempest in Mexico in the 1950s; original lithographs; tapestries; sketches; sculptures; jewellery and paintings.

“The exhibition will examine Carrington’s legacy as a rebel – she railed against almost everyone and everything she could throughout her life, from her birth family to the social mores of her birthplace to Surrealism itself.

"It will also explore the many visionary elements of her work, especially her feminism, her ecological awareness, her interest in spirituality outside of organised religion and her understanding of a world without boundaries.”

Carrington visited Sussex with her long-time friend and patron Edward James, who took her to his home at West Dean near Chichester. James, who championed her work for decades, said: “She…never relinquished her love of experimentation; the results being that she [was] able to diversify and explore a hundred or more techniques for the expression of her creative powers.”

“As the feminist art collective The Guerrilla Girls wryly commented, being a woman artist comes with the advantage of seeing your career pick up in your eighties.

"That was certainly Carrington’s experience: today, 13 years after her death, her work is at last being widely celebrated. The exhibition at Newlands House Gallery will focus on the breadth, the variety and the extraordinary imagination behind a career that spanned eight decades.”

The exhibition was made possible with the collaboration of the Leonora Carrington Council in Mexico and Rossogranada.

More details from the gallery.