Chloe Wyma at Artforum:
PAINTED IN THE 1950S on the walls of her sons’ bedroom and later collected in a children’s book called The Milk of Dreams, Leonora Carrington’s wicked fairy tales inspired the title and tenor of the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale. Filled with disobedient children, deviant friendships, orphaned monsters, evil crones, sentient meat, hungry furniture, misplaced heads, scatological warfare, and pharmacological magic, Carrington’s stories struck curator Cecilia Alemani for their construction of what she describes as “a world free of hierarchies, where everyone can become something else.” Alemani endeavored to create something like this world in her beautiful and perturbing exhibition, and to a great degree she has succeeded.
In the rotunda entrance to the Arsenale, Golden Lion winner Simone Leigh’s sightless Brick House, 2019, part female figure, part architectural envelope, is encircled by the gorgonizing black-and-white collagraphs of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón.
more here.