Encounters with Leonora Carrington’s work are often shaped by their setting, from expansive museum displays to more intimate curatorial spaces. Nowhere is this more evident than at London’s Freud Museum, where new exhibition The Symptomatic Surreal offers a markedly different lens on her life and art.It’s the first exhibition of the British-Mexican surrealist’s work in the UK for 35 years. The show offers a markedly different experience from encountering her art in Mexico, where she lived from 1942 until her death in 2011. In institutions such as the Museo de la Mujer (Woman’s Museum) in Mexico City, displays tend to emphasise the more outlandish aspects of her work and personality. Instead, The Symptomatic Surreal houses a selection of Carrington’s sketches made during her internment in Peña Castillo sanatorium in Santander, Spain, in the latter half of 1940. The exhibition is understated, located in a room far smaller and less open than where I’d engaged with her work previously. I noted no natural light can enter. It’s a perfect fit for the story of Carrington’s confinement and the creativity which ensued.It’s also important that the museum was once home to Sigmund Freud and his family. As the exhibition unfolds, psychoanalysis comes increasingly to the fore, deepening visitors’ understanding of Carrington’s life, her art and her evolving interpretations of the unconscious. Read more: Freud Museum exhibition uses art to explore the psychoanalyst’s often contradictory relationships with women A life less ordinaryBorn in Chorley, north-west England, in 1917 into a family enriched by the textile industry, Carrington felt constrained by expectations that she perform the role of a debutante, despite her growing interest in art and surrealism. Leaving the UK for Paris, she pursued both her artistic ambitions and her relationship with the established – and married – German surrealist Max Ernst. The couple later settled in Provence in the south of the country, from where Ernst periodically returned to Paris to visit his wife, to whom he remained married.The relationship was ultimately derailed in 1940 by Ernst’s second arrest for being an enemy alien in the country, and ensuing detainment in the Camp des Milles, not far from where he lived with Carrington. In despair after her separation from Ernst and enforced flight from their once shared Provençal home due to encroaching Nazi forces, Carrington crossed the border to Spain via Andorra. During the journey, her grasp on reality became fitful, resulting in a complete breakdown after she arrived in Madrid.The Symptomatic Surreal presents the aftermath of this break, focusing on Carrington’s sketches at the sanatorium where she was kept for approximately six months. She compared her time there to “being dead”, telling friend Marina Warner: “I’d suffered so much when Max was taken away to the camp, I entered a catatonic state, and I was no longer suffering in an ordinary human dimension.”Curator Vanessa Boni captures this suffering and foregrounds a period of Carrington’s life which was distinctly unsafe. It was a time during which, visitors learn, the artist was treated three times with Cardiazol, a “treatment” that induced seizures in sanatorium patients to render them compliant. Read more: New book sheds light on surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s extraordinary life and work Boni has taken Carrington’s own description of the sanatorium as “like death” to heart, making connections to death throughout the exhibition. Areas of the work foreshadow the beliefs around death Carrington would later be exposed to in Mexico. Boni’s choice to draw together statuettes and figures of Egyptian deities Anubis, Isis, Horus and Osiris from Freud’s own collection speaks to a shared interest in death as a stage of transformation.Gently and with careful attention to language, the exhibition traces Carrington’s undoing and reconstitution, or “rebirth”, as Boni described it in conversation with me. This narrative unfolds through personal letters Carrington sent to her father during her internment, alongside important passages from her written work, Down Below (1944). It is further developed through the artwork of the same name, as well as sketches produced during her time in the sanatorium.We learn that both Freud and Carrington held a preoccupation with what the artist termed the “down below”, or underworld. It is hard not to see Mexico, the home of the underworld of Mictlán, a place of transformation reached after death, suggested as a fated eventual home for the artist. In Mexican belief systems, death is not feared but a constant presence for the living. This is echoed in a quotation from Carrington chosen to welcome visitors to The Symptomatic Surreal: “I didn’t know where I was going. This seems to be a recurring thing in my life. I think it’s death practice.”Having progressed through Carrington’s experiences and reactions to her treatment at the sanatorium, we are led to the painting of Down Below (1940), a piece which is certainly uneasy to take in. Lounging, disjointed figures stare vacantly, or indeed without eyes, in front of a circus tent, hinting at the frenzy which may occur behind its curtains. Glints of vibrancy – bright red stockings, mustard yellow tights, a goose feather white body and the Kelly green of Carrington’s horse alter-ego (also present in many of her sketches on display) – are at odds with the heavy experiences which led to the work’s creation, and which bleed into the darkening skies above.The Symptomatic Surreal is a potent gift for any fan of Leonora Carrington, and certainly for those who seek to understand any of her later works, whether on the canvas, drawn, sculpted or written. The Freud Museum is an excellent home for the exhibition. The show highlights the way we process the unconscious, death and our relationships with mental health through careful curatorial choices.The Symptomatic Surreal is at London’s Freud Museum until June 28 2026Ailsa Peate does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.