18 September 2026 – 10 January 2027
On 18 September, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, opens the first European museum exhibition of the Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963), featuring key works from museums in Mexico and the US alongside rarely seen pieces from private collections.
With her singular blend of precision and poetry, Remedios Varo conjures a surrealist world of mysterious musicians, eccentric scientists, strange contraptions and enigmatic travellers inhabiting imaginary landscapes and uncanny interiors. Visitors can explore her captivating images in the Louisiana’s upcoming exhibition, a timely introduction to an artist who remains largely unknown in Northern Europe.
“The dream world and the real world are the same,” declared Remedios Varo, who is known for alchemically combining traditional techniques and surrealist methods with mystical philosophical inquiry into visionary narratives. Her style – exact, meticulous and classical – reaches back to late medieval and early Renaissance painting.
An inquisitive, searching artist, Varo merged concepts from disparate fields of knowledge – from mythology and mysticism, spiritual movements and occult lore to technological advances, mechanics and quantum physics – to create thoroughly modern paintings imbued with material enchantment. She was also unequivocally a feminist, articulating a unique Surrealist vocabulary rooted in female experience and ideas of feminine creativity and self-determination.
The exhibition will present more than 70 works, spanning from the artist’s early years in Barcelona and Paris to her peak productive period in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s. Also featured are drawings, photographs and documentary material guiding visitors through Varo’s original, reality-warping universe.
In 2020, five works by Varo were showcased in the Louisiana’s Fantastic Women exhibition, a sweeping presentation of women Surrealists.
The exhibition is curated by Louisiana curator Kirsten Degel and Mexican art historian and Surrealism expert Tere Arcq.
The exhibition will subsequently travel to Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
