The Leonora Carrington exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, running from February 18, 2026 to July 19, 2026, reframes the artist as a Vitruvian Woman, a total maker of myths, metamorphosis, and symbolic craft, across 126 works in an immersive Paris setting.
The Leonora Carrington exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, running from February 18, 2026 to July 19, 2026, reframes the artist as a Vitruvian Woman, a total maker of myths, metamorphosis, and symbolic craft, across 126 works in an immersive Paris setting.
February 18, 2026
In Paris, the Musée du Luxembourg opens a rare door into Leonora Carrington’s universe, placing it firmly among the best art exhibitions Paris 2026. This landmark exhibition marks the first major retrospective in France dedicated exclusively to the British Mexican artist whose Surrealism never behaved like a style. Leonora Carrington is often labeled the Witch of Surrealism, yet the show offers a sharper, more constructive frame: the Vitruvian Woman. In this reading, her imagination becomes an instrument of harmony, balancing human and animal, masculine and feminine, scientific curiosity and mystical belief, until every boundary turns porous.
The exhibition brings together 126 works spanning painting, sculpture, tapestry, and rare documents. Rather than flattening her life into a timeline, the curators Tere Arcq and Carlos Martín build the galleries around “inner maps,” the personal myth systems Carrington used to navigate rupture, migration, and reinvention. You move from early rebellion against a wealthy British upbringing and her study of Italian Renaissance art in Florence, into the charged Surrealist years in France with Max Ernst, and then into the wartime break that pushed her through Spain and toward Mexico. Arriving in Mexico in 1942, Carrington’s practice expands in scale and confidence, flourishing alongside creative kin such as Remedios Varo while she becomes a cult figure for later generations.
One of the exhibition’s most gripping sections treats domesticity as a site of power. Leonora Carrington’s “Alchemical Kitchen” presents cooking, motherhood, and household ritual as hermetic operations, where transformation is literal, emotional, and philosophical at once. In her hands, the ordinary becomes a laboratory, and the act of making sustains a kind of spellwork grounded in daily life.
Esotericism and mythology appear as a dense, global weave rather than decorative mystery. Celtic folklore, tarot, Kabbalah, and Tibetan Buddhism feed a hybrid bestiary of half human, half animal presences that challenge the hierarchy between species. While her famous Self Portrait and Inn of the Dawn Horse, remains absent, the show compensates with powerful anchors, including The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg), works from her early Mexican period such as Artes 110 from 1944, and the ritual charged Dando de comer a una mesa from 1959. Bronze sculptures deepen the encounter, turning dream logic into tactile form.
The museum’s compact scale suits Leonora Carrington’s intimate intensity, and visitor tools support close reading. A dedicated mobile app and a sound walk help decode recurring symbols. Practical details make planning easy: the Musée du Luxembourg sits at 19 rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris, open daily from 10:30 AM to 7:00 PM, with Mondays extending to 10:00 PM. Tickets are about 14 to 16 euros, and visitors under 16 receive free entry, with youth offers available.
