Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo was born in 1908 in Anglès, Spain, and passed away at age 54 in Mexico City, Mexico in 1963. Raised by a Catholic mother and an agnostic engineer father, these two forces-the spiritual and scientific-greatly influenced Varo's artistic career. A Spanish artist who played an integral role in the Mexico City-based Surrealist movement, Varo is known for her enigmatic paintings which unite scientific technical precision with esoteric and feminist subject matter.

After graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, Varo moved to Barcelona in the mid-1930s and joined the Surrealist avant-garde art group Logicophobista. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, she fled to Paris with Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret. In Paris, Varo became deeply involved with the Paris-based Surrealists, and her work was exhibited in the ground-breaking exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1936), as well as multiple early Surrealist exhibitions around the globe: Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Tokyo, 1936), Surrealist Objects & Poems (London, 1937), Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Paris, 1938), Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo (Mexico City, 1940), to name a few.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Varo fled Nazi-occupied France for Mexico City, where she connected with other exiled artists such as Alice Rahon, Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Leonora Carrington, who became Varo's closest friend and colleague. During her early years in Mexico City, Varo honed her distinctive painting style while working various odd jobs, most notably creating illustrations for the pharmaceutical firm Casa Bayer between 1942 and 1949.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Varo experienced domestic stability that enabled her to devote the rest of her life to painting. During these years, she produced a body of work typified by its female and androgynous figures (often disguised portraits of Varo herself), mystical narrative content, and a quality of ambiguity, mystery, and dark humor. In this last decade of her career, she developed a unique and virtuosic painting style that paired detailed preparatory drawings and meticulous rendering of her primary subjects in the tradition of early Renaissance masters, with Surrealist-derived automatic techniques like decalcomania. In 1956, Varo had her first major solo exhibition in Mexico City, and it catapulted her to the forefront of the art scene. She continued to exhibit widely thereafter before her premature death in 1963.

Varo created roughly 400 works of art, over half of them drawings, which are now globally dispersed. Walter Gruen donated 38 significant artworks to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. Gallery Wendi Norris has worked with Varo's art since 2004 and has been the only gallery to present solo exhibitions of the artist since she passed away: Indelible Fables (2012), Remedios Varo: Encuentros (2023), and A Visionary Line: Remedios Varo Drawings (2024).

In 2023, Varo was the subject of the solo exhibition Remedios Varo: Science Fictions at the Art Institute of Chicago. Varo's work has been acquired by museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. She has had solo shows at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2000); Mexican Fine Arts Museum, Chicago, (2000); Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, (1971, 1983, 1994, 2001, 2016, 2018); and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba), Argentina (2020).

Varo's work has been included in many group museum exhibitions, including Surrealism: Desire Unbound, Tate Modern Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2001); In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (2012); Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Campo Cerrado: Spanish Art 1939-1953, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2016); The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2018); Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2020) and Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2020); Surrealism Beyond Borders, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021) and Tate Modern, London (2022); Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2022) and Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (2022); and the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022).