A Rare ‘Otherworldly’ Sculpture by Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington Is Going to Auction

As Surrealism celebrates its 100th birthday, a rare sculpture by renowned Surrealist Leonora Carrington is going up for auction.

On November 18, Sotheby’s will sell La Grande Dame (The Cat Woman), which the British-Mexican artist created in 1951. The piece is expected to sell for between $5 million and $7 million.

The “otherworldly” sculpture is made of carved and polychrome wood, which Carrington painted with depictions of “hybrid creatures and lush dreamscapes” that evoke “a lasting sense of awe,” per Sotheby’s. At more than six feet tall, La Grande Dame is a “poised, puzzling figure with elongated features and an indecipherable expression spread across its spade-shaped head,” as Artnet’s Richard Whiddington writes.

Experts have raised concerns about the authenticity of some of the sculptures attributed to Carrington, according to the Art Newspaper’s Hannah McGivern. However, La Grande Dame isn’t one of them. Sotheby’s says that Harold Gabriel Weisz Carrington, the artist’s eldest son and president of the Fundación Leonora Carrington, has confirmed the work’s authenticity.

Museums, as well as private collectors, are expected to bid on the sculpture. It’s being sold by a “distinguished private American collection,” per Sotheby’s. The piece was previously owned by Edward James, a British patron of the Surrealist movement. This is the first time it’s come up for public auction in three decades.

“This is her greatest sculpture,” Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of Impressionist and modern art for the Americas, tells ARTnews’ Karen K. Ho.

Dawes adds that her work is “very relevant across the world.” Carrington was “a British artist working in Mexico using Egyptian and Celtic and pre-Columbian iconography, creating something that’s wholly fantastical and original,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a lot of institutional activity.”

Another piece by Carrington, a 1945 painting called Les Distractions de Dagobert, sold for a record $28.5 million earlier this year. Experts say demand for Carrington’s work has surged as the art world has shifted its focus to the often-overlooked women of the Surrealist movement.

Born to a wealthy family in England in 1917, Carrington was a rebellious child who was expelled from at least two convent schools. When she was 14, her parents sent her to an Italian boarding school, where she took up painting.

She later moved to London, then Paris, and began participating in the Surrealist movement in the late 1930s. Carrington relocated to Mexico in 1942, became a naturalized Mexican citizen and spent the rest of her life in the country. She died in 2011 at age 94.

Carrington was primarily a painter, but she was also a writer and sculptor. Her work often featured goddesses, animals, human-animal hybrids, mythological creatures and otherworldly scenes. However, as with the work of other Surrealists, Carrington’s art is difficult to characterize—and she liked it that way.

“Throughout her life, she refused to explain her work … and she disliked any attempt to impose the order of language onto her visuals,” wrote Artsy’s Siobhan Leddy in 2019. “In seeing beyond the visible world, beyond the rational or comprehensible, Carrington leaves us only with abstract terms like ‘magic.’”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.