Cecilia Vicuña and Leonora Carrington at Lehmann Maupin

Lehmann Maupin's Chelsea gallery at 501 West 24th Street presents a two-artist show of Cecilia Vicuña and Leonora Carrington from November 19 to December 19, 2026. It is the first time the two artists' work has been placed in dialogue. The checklist combines new works by Vicuña with historical works by Carrington. The exhibition is organized with Gallery Wendi Norris and travels to that gallery in San Francisco in January 2027.

The pairing rests on a personal history. Vicuña met Carrington in 1969, and the encounter left a lasting mark on her practice, introducing her to a new method of painting. More than fifty years later, the show revisits that connection and the shared outlook behind it: both artists turn to myth, ritual, and poetry, and both dissolve the lines between the human, the natural, and the imagined.

Vicuña was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1948 and lives and works in New York and Santiago. Her practice spans poetry, performance, Conceptualism, and textile, and takes on ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. She was exiled in the early 1970s after the military coup against President Salvador Allende. Her "precarios," begun in the mid-1960s, are small spatial poems made from feathers, stone, shells, cloth, and discarded matter, some assembled at the shoreline so the tide could erase them. Her quipu works draw on the Andean system of knotted strings. Her figurative paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s answer colonization, replacing religious icons with personal, political, and literary figures.

Carrington was born in Lancashire, England, in 1917 and died in Mexico City in 2011, aged 94. Over nearly seven decades she worked in painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, printmaking, and writing. Her work is held by institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, SFMOMA, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Works named for the show include Vicuña's Medusa (1972/2023) and Polvo del Sahara / Saharan Desert Dust (2026), and Carrington's Eye Witness (1987) and a preliminary drawing for Rueda de los caballos (1954). The New York run coincides with Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads at Whitechapel Gallery in London, the first major UK exhibition devoted to her work.

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM.