Remedios Varo was born in 1908 in Anglès, Spain, & passed away at age 54 in Mexico City, Mexico in 1963. Raised by a Catholic mother & an agnostic engineer father, these two forces-the spiritual & 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 & 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 & 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, & 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. 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, & Leonora Carrington, who became Varo's closest friend & colleague. During her early years in Mexico City, Varo honed her distinctive painting style while working as an illustrator.
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 & androgynous figures (often disguised portraits of Varo herself), mystical narrative content, & a quality of ambiguity, mystery, and dark humor. In this last decade of her career, she developed a unique & virtuosic painting style that paired detailed preparatory drawings & 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, & it catapulted her to the forefront of the art scene. She continued to exhibit widely thereafter before her premature death in 1963.
(Courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris)
My portrait honoring Remedios Varo is, in itself, a surrealist painting— as one cannot tell where the easel ends & the artist begins: she is both within it & outside of it. From her paintbrush, birds emerge. I have layered in an old map of the star constellations; pages from an old History of Mexico book, as well as pages from an astronomy textbook; a Denver Art Museum pass; grapefruit sparkling water packaging; a Nopaleria sugar body scrub box; a museum ticket from Padua, Italy, of an exhibition of early Modernist renderers; a Cafe Delight sugar packet; & more…
