Untitled Art: Houston

Our presentation unites six visionary women artists whose practices intersect through material, metaphysical and psychological experience: Sofia Bassi (1913–1998, Mexican), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011, British-Mexican), Cossette Zeno (b. 1930, Dominican-Puerto Rican; lives and works in Jackson, Missouri), Olga de Amaral (b.1932, Colombian, lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia), Romany Eveleigh (1934–2020, American–British) and Bea Scaccia (b. 1978, Italian; lives and works in New York City). Rather than proposing a single Surrealist lineage, the presentation traces affinities between Surrealism’s twentieth-century avant-garde, its contemporary bastions, and pioneering artists beyond the movement who similarly investigate transformation, spirituality and worlds beyond the visible.

Spanning almost seven decades in age, their practices form a cross-generational focus on the shifting boundaries between the material and immaterial, the body and psyche, and the visible and unseen. Carrington’s enduring significance has most recently been recognised through the landmark exhibition Leonora Carrington at Palazzo Reale, Milan, and Musée du Luxembourg, Paris (2025–26), while Manina is undergoing a significant rediscovery after a twenty-year absence from public view. This renewed attention extends to Bassi, presented in Sofia Bassi + Elena del Rivero at Travesía Cuatro, Ciudad de México (2023), Zeno, included in Surrealism and Us at The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (2024), and Parent, the subject of a joint retrospective with Jean Benôit at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2004). Beyond Surrealism, Eveleigh and de Amaral were both included in the 2024 Venice Biennale, while de Amaral’s first major European retrospective opened at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain that same year (2024-25). Scaccia carries these concerns into a contemporary context, most recently through her inclusion in the 18^th Quadriennale d’Arte, Rome (2025).

This presentation is conceived as a cluster of affinities rather than a survey of a movement. Carrington, Bassi, and Zeno use metamorphic bodies, symbolic motifs and biomorphic forms to give shape to psychic and imagined worlds. Scaccia engages the uncanny and monstrous to destabilise body, identity and surface. De Amaral and Eveleigh broaden the dialogue from outside Surrealism through distinct approaches: de Amaral transforms fibre into works charged with spiritual and sensory resonance, while Eveleigh uses abstraction, gesture and mark-making to create spaces for contemplation. Across these distinct practices, the metaphysical becomes a means of exploring transformation, resistance and self-invention.