Bridget Tichenor (1917-1990) Woman in a Crystal Cube with Cats and Serpents, c. 1970's

A young woman in a red jersey floats weightless inside a block of ice that stands, like a reliquary, on a green plain beneath a storm-blue sky. Three cats and two coiling serpents keep watch at its foot; a small black-and-white lozenge lies in the grass. It is the kind of hermetic, dream-charged image that made Bridget Tichenor one of the most distinctive voices of Mexican surrealism, alongside her friends Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.

Tichenor (1917–1990), Paris-born and raised between England, Italy and Mexico, worked in the slow, tempera-like manner of the Old Masters: many thin, glazed layers on a smooth Masonite panel, built up with tiny brushes so that the surface reads almost like enamel. The present panel shows that technique at its best — the transparency of the ice, the wind in the hair, the individually painted blades of grass.

The subject follows her lifelong preoccupations: the human figure as a vessel, animals as guardians and familiars, an alchemical landscape where the ordinary is quietly suspended. The work comes from a Mexico City collection and then a Brussels collection, and has never been offered at auction before.