Image: Wang You, Infinite Encores, 2026
Upsilon Gallery's Milan space presents Dreamers Wanderers Heroines, a group exhibition running from 9 to 25 October 2026 that brings together two leading women of Surrealism, Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington, with the young Chinese painter Wang You.
The gallery describes the three as women separated by generations and geography but sharing the same instinct: to embrace the absurdity of existence and turn it into a world of their own. Its exhibition text opens with the idea that life itself is surreal, a circus entered without a script, in which some look on from outside while others step into the ring and play along.
For Fini and Carrington, the gallery argues, Surrealism was less a movement of their time than a way of living. Both surrounded themselves with mystery, theatre, animals, masks, myth and transformation, and the gallery suggests that, in retrospect, they were as much feminists as surrealists. On view are works by Carrington from 2011, among them the lithograph And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur and El llanto del gato, and works by Fini including Face (Red) from 1960, Chat parmi les fleurs and costume designs for Le Balcon from 1969, and a set of Sphinx images from 1966.
Wang You is presented as a newer voice in this lineage. Her paintings, all made in 2026 and including Infinite Encores, Directorial Debut, Dancing on the Roof and Pierrot's Game, stage enigmatic figures and animals in circus-like scenes poised between celebration and solitude, which the gallery likens to a forgotten Fellini film.
Rather than tracing a strict historical line, the gallery presents the exhibition as a tribute to a shared attitude towards life and creation, with the circus as a recurring metaphor for existence.
