Goings on About Town: Leonora Carrington

LEONORA CARRINGTON

Six oversized masks, suspended by fishing line, hover around a temporary, low-ceilinged space. They're a surprising, even anticlimactic centerpiece for the first New York show in twenty-two years devoted to this legendary Surrealist painter, who was born in England but spent most of her career steeped in mysticism in Mexico. Carrington, who died in 2011, at the age of ninety-four, made these Polynesian- and Native American-influenced masks in 1976, for her play “Opus Siniestrus: The Story of the Last Egg,” a dystopian magical-realist drama that was never staged. Their fantastical forms extend the feminist-animist cosmology of her transfixing canvases. The twenty or so paintings here span four decades, beginning in the nineteen-forties; symbolically dense, they depict embattled demons, alchemical processes, and fantastical beings convening in dark rooms and in gardens. In the characteristically bizarre and compelling “Pig Rush,” a golden-hued picture from 1960, spectral swine swarm a trio of robed and bearded patriarchs.

—Johanna Fateman