Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo (born December 16, 1908, Anglès, Spain—died October 8, 1963, Mexico City, Mexico) was a Spanish-born artist associated with the Surrealist movement who developed her mature career in Mexico. She is known for meticulously rendered fantastical paintings that combine science, alchemy, mysticism, psychology, and magic, often depicting androgynous figures engaged in mysterious experiments, journeys, or quests.

Early life and education

Varo was raised in a well-educated family. Her father, a hydraulics engineer, taught her technical drawing when she was young. His job required frequent travel, and the family traveled throughout Spain and North Africa before settling in Madrid in 1917. In Madrid Varo attended Catholic school and then pursued art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, graduating in 1930 with a degree qualifying her to teach drawing.

Joining the Surrealist movement

In the mid-1930s, while living in Barcelona, Varo began to involve herself in Surrealism and joined the avant-garde artists’ group Logicophobista. In 1936 she met Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, with whom she fled Spain for Paris; they married in 1937. They were soon absorbed into the activities of the Surrealists there, and Varo exhibited with the group and published drawings in Surrealist publications.

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Fleeing to Mexico

In late 1941 the couple fled again, this time to Mexico to escape Nazi-occupied France. In Mexico City they connected with locals, such as writer Octavio Paz, as well as other exiled artists and writers, among them Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Leonora Carrington, who became Varo’s closest friend. Varo’s first pursuits in Mexico City were in commercial art, interior and costume design, and restoration of pre-Columbian pottery. She began to devote her time entirely to painting only in 1953, by which time she had separated from Péret and was romantically involved with Austrian businessman Walter Gruen, who supported her painting activity.

Description of work

In large part, Varo’s paintings are populated with strange humans engaged in mystical and alchemical activity in dreamlike atmospheres. Her compositions also include architectural features that make direct reference to medieval art and show her expert draftsmanship. She was an admirer of Hiëronymus Bosch, whose mysterious compositions undoubtedly influenced her. Varo’s first solo exhibition in Mexico City in 1956 brought her widespread recognition; crowds came to see her paintings, and demand for her work soon produced waiting lists for commissions. She continued to exhibit thereafter and created the bulk of her work in the last 10 years of her life.

Legacy

After Varo died in 1963 of a heart attack at age 54, her reputation remained strong in her adopted country, with a 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico that drew record-breaking crowds. For decades she was less widely known internationally than many of her male Surrealist contemporaries, but exhibitions abroad, such as “The Magic of Remedios Varo” (2000) at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., helped introduce her art to wider audiences. Renewed scholarly interest in women associated with Surrealism has further elevated her standing, emphasizing the originality with which she combined science, mysticism, psychology, and women’s experience. Today Varo is recognized as a significant figure in both Surrealism and 20th-century Mexican art, and exhibitions such as the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Remedios Varo: Science Fictions” (2023) have continued to reassess the complexity of her work and its contribution to modern art.