Dreamers Wanderers Heroines: Group Show

Life is surreal.

A succession of strange encounters, improbable characters, sudden tragedies, absurd comedies and fleeting moments of beauty. We enter the circus without ever being given the script. Some choose to watch it from the outside and insist on taking reality literally by searching for order and meaning in its chaos. Others step into the ring, surrender to the music, and decide to dance willing to play along with its absurdity.

This exhibition brings together Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington, two major figures of Surrealism in dialogue with the paintings of the young Chinese artist Wang You. Three women, separated by generations and geography yet united by a remarkable instinct: to embrace the beautiful nonsense of existence and transform it into a world of their own. Three women. Three worlds, brought together by the same irresistible desire: to dream beyond the limits of reality.

For Fini and Carrington, Surrealism was never simply a cultural movement of their time. It is their freedom and the way they inhabited the world that made them surrealists hence linking them to the movement. They surrounded themselves with mystery, theatre, animals, masks, myth and metamorphosis, turning life itself into an endless performance. Their imaginations became territories of freedom, transgressing the rules established back then. Retrospectively, they were as much feminists as they were surrealists.

Decades later, Wang You enters this lineage with a poetic language of her own. Her paintings feel like a travelling circus discovered somewhere between waking and dreaming. In her theatrical scenes, populated by enigmatic characters and animals caught between celebration and solitude, reality and hallucination, we step into a forgotten Fellini film —one in which nothing quite makes sense, yet everything somehow feels true.

The circus becomes a metaphor of life itself: the wandering caravan, the painted faces, the impossible acrobatics, the elongated dancers, the animals, the laughter and the melancholy existing together under the same tent.

Fini, Carrington and Wang You invite us inside.

Rather than tracing a strict historical lineage, the exhibition is an ode to these women sharing same attitude toward life and creation. There is something profoundly gypsy in these paintings: a restless freedom, a refusal of permanence, an appetite for elsewhere. The canvas becomes a caravan, a stage, a nocturnal landscape through which figures, stories and desires pass without ever settling.

They show us, through their works and through their lives, that there is joy in the nonsense of life because the most surreal thing of all is life itself.