Lehmann Maupin and Gallery Wendi Norris will collaborate on a two-part exhibition pairing the work of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña for the first time.
The first part of the exhibition, titled “Leonora Carrington & Cecilia Vicuña,” will open at Lehmann Maupin in New York on November 19, while the second part will open at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco in January. The two parts have distinct checklists, to accommodate for the different scale of each location, though the parts share some overlap.
Dealer Wendi Norris proposed the show to Rachel Lehmann, one of Lehmann Maupin’s cofounders, a few years ago. Lehmann was reminded of the conversation after visiting 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,” said Lehmann, who reached out to Norris to see if she would still like to work on the exhibition. “One of the things we do is try to position our artists in different ways, and [it] became suddenly so obvious to me that I had missed out actually on something with Wendi.”
Norris began representing Carrington in 2004, seven years before the artist’s death in 2011 at 94. Over the years, she has placed Carrington’s work in intergenerational group exhibitions and staged reenactments of her plays, but this is Norris’s first show featuring both the Surrealist’s art and the work of a living contemporary artist.
“I love putting Leonora Carrington’s work in new context,” Norris told ARTnews. “I’m constantly trying to imagine how she would respond to things that we do, like this exhibition. One thing I feel I can say very certainly is that she would be overwhelmingly excited about an exhibition like this.”
The connection between Vicuña and Carrington extends back much further. In 1969, Vicuña, then in her early 20s, met Carrington in Mexico City while she was en route back to Chile after a trip to New York. In New York, Vicuña had “a vision [of] the painting that I needed to do,” she recalled. During that fateful meeting, which was explored in the IMMA exhibition, Carrington gave Vicuña advice that helped the young artist “transfer” what she saw to canvas, for a process she would call Calcomanías. “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.
Norris added, “The exhibition, I think, will enable viewers to delve deeper into Carrington’s iconography and language, and the way it feels to read it, alongside Cecilia’s. I, for one, am excited to see what it will uncover. I don’t want to predict it because I’m excited about what I’m going to discover myself.”
The exhibition will feature new works by Vicuña alongside important historical ones by Carrington. In selecting which pieces to feature, the two galleries were guided by “the relationship that both artists had,” Lehmann said. “What has struck me most in speaking to Cecilia over the years was the influence that Carrington brought to her practice.”
One of Vicuña’s new paintings is Polvo del Sahara/ Saharan Desert Dust (2026), an underwater scene showing the light reflecting into the depths of the ocean, where a stone staircase leads to somewhere beyond the horizon. Lehmann hopes the exhibition will shed light not only on how Carrington’s influence will help us “to understand where Cecilia’s paintings are coming from,” but also on how “Cecilia continues Carrington’s legacy.”
Norris described the building of the checklists for each show as “an iterative process” that involved sharing images of potential works and their contexts over several months. “We were trying to think of 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,” Norris said, noting that after each proposal, she would ask: “How does that land with you and your audience?”
Norris has also thought about which of Carrington’s works to show in which venue, including showing two works that were included in her 1990 show at the Brewster Gallery and have not been shown in New York since. One is Eye Witness (1987), a wintry landscape of two figures who seem to look away from an apparition of sorts; a skyscraper in the distance bears a resemblance to the Empire State Building.
The two artists’ work has been featured in one recent exhibition, the 2022 Venice Biennale, whose title of “The Milk of Dreams” came from one of Carrington’s books. Vicuña was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement ahead of the Biennale’s opening. However, the two artists were featured in separate sections of the Biennale, so they were not positioned together, as they will be in this show.
Since the 2022 Biennale, Carrington’s work has also been seeing a revival lately, as it has been the subject of two traveling surveys, one that opened at the Palazzo Reale di Milano in 2025 and another that is currently on view at the Faro Santander in Spain. Beyond Carrington and Vicuña’s stylistic affinities, Lehmann and Norris pointed out how the reception of the artists’ work has changed over the decades and that both have only been canonized relatively recently.
“This has been a long time coming for artists like Leonora and Cecilia,” Norris said. “I think Leonora probably knew it was coming but was nonplussed about it. She knew she was planting seeds, and they were going to bear fruit one day.”