Hesper Cane
May 16, 2023
Rupturing the framework of reality presents the mechanism Remedios Varo repeatedly employed in her painting practice to dissect the limits of consciousness. Caught between movement and stillness, Varo's cryptic figures, often female, are confronted with supernatural phenomena in austere surroundings.
After organizing her first solo gallery show more than ten years ago, Gallery Wendi Norris highlights Varo's surreal encounters in the exhibition Remedios Varo: Encuentros, aiming to underline her pivotal role in defining feminist Surrealism.
Remedios Varo received her first drawing lessons from her father and then attained academic training. Leaving Madrid for Barcelona, and later Paris, meant for Varo to release the bonds of academicism and encounter Surrealism, which marked a significant turning point in her practice. Still, it would turn out that crossing the ocean and finding a new home in Mexico in 1941 signified a more critical moment, which enabled Varo to find her authentic, surrealistic visual language. Although Varo's first Mexican paintings were deeply imbued with the traumatic memories of the war raging in Europe, her motifs soon transcended into a dream-like plane of her imagination.
Remedios Varo: Encuentros explores key points in Varo's career in a delicate display of roughly twelve works, including her last painting Naturaleza muerta resucitando from 1963. Although formally a still life, the image represents a whirlwind of movement, a cosmos made of apples, thus transforming it into a personal commentary on the genre. A particular delight of the show represents rarely seen works on paper, such as Apártalos que voy de paso (1959), which reminds the viewer of Varo's mastery to achieve a powerful vision through delicate touch. Wendi Norris, Varo's gallerist and market expert, expressed:
This exhibition presents a rare and extraordinary opportunity to view powerful and awe-inspiring works by Remedios Varo, an imaginative artist whose mastery puts her in the ranks of the greatest painters of the 20th century.
The exhibition's title derives from one of her iconic paintings, Encuentro (1959), which features a woman in a wispy blue dress opening a box. An identical face stares back inside it, making this an emblematic image of curious encounters representative in Varo's work. Declaring that "the dream world and the real world are the same," Varo often investigated the reality of dreams and the dreaminess of the real creating works that are suspended in between.
REMEDIOS VARO AT GALLERY WENDI NORRIS
Gallery Wendi Norris has, since its opening in 2002, established a model focused on developing long-standing commitments to 20th-century visionary artists and their legacies. Such a model affected a change in institutional attention directed at Remedios Varo's works, which is rapidly gaining momentum. It has led to recent acquisitions by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Toledo Museum of Art, and features in recent notable exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Tate Modern in London. Additionally, the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, featured Remedios Varo's work.
The exhibition Remedios Varo: Encuentros will be on view at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco until July 15th, 2023.
