Leonora Carrington @ Tate Liverpool

When the featured artist of an exhibition is a Lancashire-born Mexican surrealist, you can almost guarantee you'll encounter some wonderful weirdness. It's strange, then, that Leonora Carrington's exhbition fails because it is perhaps just too much of an oddness overload.

Upon entry to the wide, attic space of Tate Liverpool, the retrospective comes out swinging with The Magical World of the Mayas – an enormous, panoramic painting that feels straight from a 70s LP space opera cover, with its falling ghosts hoisting rabid wolves amidst disembodied faces, which hang ethereal amongst alien hills. As busy as any Hieronymus Bosch (the artist discovered him aged 23 while in Madrid, having suffered a breakdown and while living in an asylum), the work must be scoured all over for its subversions, every inch layered with some absurd, enchanting invention.

This painting soon loses some of its lustre, however, when a few laps of the extensive collection have been made. It’s not that Carrington is not an interesting painter, it’s just that her own specialities feel stretched thin due to the large amount of her work displayed. As opposed to other stylistically relatable artists such as Rene Magritte, Carrington also tends to return to her trusty motifs – limbs, human-animal hybrids, arcane symbolism – too frequently. Sometimes, it seems, her work thumbs clumsily between the heights of the surrealists that so clearly inspired and her own artistic concerns – appearing as regurgitation rather than trailblazing.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t bafflingly brilliant pieces throughout that need to be seen. The Giantest (Guardian of the Egg) is one of the best examples; a Godzilla-like princess with cornfield locks, striding amongst a sea of monsters. Her more playful work is infinitely interesting and criminally unexplored. The wry sketch I am an Amateur of Velocipedes, for example, forms an odd pencil amalgam of ghost and carriage that feels more sincere in its abstraction than much of the repetitive brushwork featured. Delicate Fly is another terrific experiment, a thin inked cut-out of an insect with another growing with its own shell that is detailed in great colour and shade; the cut out sockets starkly white against the biology board that props it up.

It is a shame then that there are just too many samey paintings here. If Tate had halved the exhibition size, the issue of pictorial malaise would’ve certainly been less of an issue, and it doesn’t help that no really rigorous biographical backbone is established. Rather, fairly innocuous quotes by the artists stencilled into various corners only help to solidify her evidently unfocused style. This exhibition is still certainly worth a visit in spite of these curatorial concerns. Indeed, the madness of the images have calmed but a jot since their emergence, with the repeating egg shell heads of The Temptation of St. Anthony and Mr. Ruiz in the Nightingale’s light-heartedness particularly worth seeing.