Collecting guide: the surreal science of Remedios Varo

María de los Remedios Varo y Uranga was born in the small Spanish town of Anglès, Girona, in 1908. She was named after the Virgin of Los Remedios by her mother, a devout Catholic, and attended a convent school. Varo found her strict Catholic upbringing isolating and claustrophobic, but it influenced her work and she differed from other Surrealists in her frequent use of religious imagery. Catholicism, Western and non-Western mysticism, magic-based faiths, witchcraft, astrology, tarot and alchemy all fed into her paintings.

A native Spaniard, Varo spent most of her life in transit, first due to her father’s transient job during her childhood, then in adulthood as a political refugee. She moved to Paris in 1937 and due to her political ties was banned from returning to Spain following the Spanish Civil War. When World War II neared Paris in 1940, Varo was imprisoned with her partner Benjamin Péret because of his political activities. Upon their release they caught one of the last ships allowed to depart the country and fled to Mexico. 

The experience of displacement was reflected in Varo’s paintings of people in transit — sailing in precarious boats, wandering through forests and riding bicycles. She incorporated other, more surreal vehicles of voyage in her work too, as in Exploración de las fuentes del río Orinoco. Here, a figure is ferried by a dreamlike ‘boat’ to a wooden hut, where a goblet is overflowing. This work alludes to Varo’s gold-mining trip to Venezuela.

Despite Surrealism’s insistence on cultural liberation, it was largely an all male affair. The 1924 Surrealist manifesto excluded female artists, and women were often relegated to the role of 'artist's muse.' The work of Varo together with that of other artists of her generation like Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning, represented a vital antidote to this male-dominated narrative.

Varo was not only a leading female artist of the Surrealist movement, but she frequently used her art to assert the collective power of women and femininity. Likewise, her paintings often represent women as the central protagonists fully in control of the environs they inhabit. She frequently incorporated motifs like ‘the cage’ and ‘the tower’ into her work, representing the urge to break free from patriarchal structures, and her use of feminine tropes like ‘the boudoir’ in her work was just as revolutionary in the male-dominated world of Surrealist painting.

Varo and Carrington had met in Paris, but their close friendship really bloomed after they both immigrated to Mexico City. The two Surrealist artists would meet almost every evening for dinner to talk about each other’s work and share ideas about the universe, the supernatural, alchemy and astrology. Although the artists interpreted these topics differently, they both infused their paintings with mysticism and alternate realities. 

Homo Rodans (1959), the only sculpture that Varo ever produced, is made with chicken and fish bones believed to have been discarded from one of their famous dinner parties: a relic of one of the most significant female friendships in the history of art.

Fantasy and reality, magic and science, the imagined and the empirical — these seemingly opposing forces are united in Varo’s work. She was an exceptionally well-read polymath, whose scientific knowledge fed into her work and fused with its spirituality and mysticism.

Varo’s father was a hydraulic engineer, and he fuelled her interest in mathematics, science and perspective from an early age. As a child, he would ask her to copy the technical plans and architectural diagrams of his various projects and often had her redo them if they were not exact replicas. Her empirical approach is reflected in the detailed perfectionism of her paintings, where miniature imagined worlds are rendered with phenomenal precision.

Varo was particularly influenced by the mystic George Gurdjieff. She attended consciousness-raising workshops based on his teachings, where participants were guided to tap into their deepest imaginations. They would concentrate for hours on an inanimate object, like a chair, focusing on the life that had existed within the object. The wood in the chair, for example, had come from a tree, which had once been alive. Gurdjieff’s perspective informed her work, where natural and artificial objects and bodies often mirror and merge into one another.

Varo was inspired by the perspective drawing method, illusionism techniques, tonal nuances and narrative structure of Renaissance paintings. The allegorical nature of much of her work and her focus on magic and alchemy especially recalls the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, but we can also recognize the influence of Francisco Goya and El Greco. Varo developed her own meticulous painting process that was inspired by Renaissance panel painting and differentiated her from her contemporaries: she would transfer underdrawings onto gessoed fibreboard and build up luminous colours with layers of oil and varnish, adding tiny details with a single-hair brush.   

However, she was also undeniably influenced by her Surrealist contemporaries like André Breton and Giorgio de Chirico, and she used Surrealist techniques like decalcomania, in which designs on paper or aluminium foil are pressed onto another surface, transferring the image.

Many Surrealists identified with animals. Breton, for example, was given the affectionate nickname le tamamoir — ‘the anteater’ — by his peers, and it’s thought that Dalí’s pet anteater was an homage to his friend.  

Some took this a little further, adopting an animal alter ego in their work. Carrington identified with the horse, as in her Self-Portrait or The Inn of the Dawn Horse, while Max Ernst identified with a bird he named ‘Loplop’. Varo’s alter ego was the cat, and felines appear frequently in her work, as in Simpatía, also known by the title La rabia del gato (The Madness of the Cat). The figure here is widely presumed to be a depiction of the artist herself, but Varo has adjusted the facial features to be strikingly similar to the cat in the painting, even adding three cattails protruding from underneath the figure’s dress.

Varo made what is widely considered her most important work in the 1950s and early 1960s, whilst living in Mexico City, where she finally found success and an enduring artistic practice. The war had been a difficult and tumultuous time for her. In Mexico she met the businessman Walter Gruen, who was a stabilizing force in her life and provided her with the means to fund her artistic practice without distractions.  

Mexico also liberated Varo from the sexism of the European art world. Her early exposure to Surrealist and Cubist artists was formative in Varo’s later practice, but she produced little work while in Paris, describing her position as ‘the timid and humble one of a listener.’ Reflecting on her male peers’ contemptuous attitudes towards women artists, she said ‘I was not old enough nor did I have the aplomb to face up to them, to a Paul Élouard, a Benjamin Péret, or an André Breton. There I was with my mouth gaping open within this group of brilliant and gifted people.’  

In Mexico, however, she formed strong friendships with other female artists like Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna and produced a resplendent body of work that frequently elevated feminine figures. This mature period was tragically short-lived, as Varo died suddenly of a heart attack in 1963 at just 54 years old.

Although Varo was relatively successful in her lifetime, it is only recently that she has begun getting the international recognition that she deserves. Almost 60 years after her death, Varo’s work continues to rise on the market.  

This is partly because of her works’ scarcity — Varo’s intricate paintings took a long time to produce, and she died in the prime of her career. As a result, works by Varo are rare to the market. But Varo’s strong market can also be attributed to a larger shift in the art market, where a re-evaluation and greater appreciation of women Surrealists is occurring.  

MoMA acquired Varo’s work in 2012, in 2022 she was featured in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, and in 2023, the Art Institute of Chicago will present an exhibition dedicated entirely to her work, Remedios Varo: Science Fictions.