Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London has opened the first European solo exhibition of Sofía Bassi, the Mexican Surrealist painter who died in 1998. Titled Floating Between Earth and Sky, the show runs from 9 October to 14 November 2026 at the gallery's Heddon Street space. It brings together paintings and works on paper, and for the first time presents the sculptural side of her practice to the public, including painted ostrich eggs. Bassi (1913–1998) is an improbable figure in the Surrealist story. She did not pick up a paintbrush until she was 51, in 1963, and held her first solo show just two years later. Her career was then interrupted by a prison sentence: convicted over the killing of her son-in-law, she spent five years in jail. Confinement became her most productive period — some 250 works were made inside her cell, each signed with the initials ELC, short for the Spanish phrase meaning "in jail." The prison pictures form the core of the London exhibition. Bassi painted ghostly female figures drifting above or through dusky, nocturnal cityscapes — images of freedom from a painter who had lost hers. Among the rarities on view is an altarpiece from 1970 titled Open this door at which I call, sobbing, together with the first ostrich eggs she ever painted, treated as small sculptural objects. The show makes a case for Bassi's place alongside the better-known names of Mexican Surrealism. The gallery presents a painter whose dreamlike imagery — drawn from folklore, forests and myth — arrived fully formed despite her late start, and whose most urgent work was produced under the harshest possible constraint.