Carrington's 1940 Villa Pilar Painting to Debut in London After Decades in Private Hands
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · May 28
Carrington's 1940 Villa Pilar Painting to Debut in London After Decades in Private Hands
2 articles · Updated · The Guardian · May 28
Villa Pilar — a Leonora Carrington painting made in 1940 during her confinement in a Santander psychiatric hospital — will go on public display for the first time this summer at London’s Freud Museum.
The work surfaced during research for Leonora Carrington – the Symptomatic Surreal, after the family of psychiatrist Dr Luis Morales, who received it from Carrington, agreed to lend it publicly.
Curators say the painting and its companion work Down Below recast the hospital as a symbolic underworld, with hybrid figures and green landscapes that foreshadow motifs central to Carrington’s later art.
The unveiling has extended the London exhibition to 10 August before the painting travels in September to Faro Santander, linking the rediscovery to the Spanish city where Carrington endured traumatic wartime treatment.
The display adds to renewed attention on Carrington, who later became a leading surrealist in Mexico; one of her paintings sold for £22.5 million in 2024, a record for a UK-born female artist.
With her art fetching millions, what secrets does this rediscovered asylum painting hold about her traumatic past?
Was Carrington's 'gift' to her doctor a thank you for her recovery, or a critique of her confinement?
"Villa Pilar" Unveiled: The 2026 Public Debut and Wartime Surrealism of Leonora Carrington at the Freud Museum
Overview
In 2026, Leonora Carrington’s 1940 painting "Villa Pilar" made its public debut as the centerpiece of the London exhibition "Leonora Carrington – The Symptomatic Surreal" at the Freud Museum. This groundbreaking show is the first to focus exclusively on Carrington’s rarely-seen wartime works, bringing together her art and writings from 1938 to 1941—a period marked by her escape from Nazi-occupied France and her hospitalization in Spain. The exhibition offers a unique look at how Carrington transformed personal trauma into surrealist art, deepening our understanding of her creative journey and legacy.