Collecting guide: the surreal science of Remedios Varo
An introduction to the Surrealist painter who merged science and mysticism in her imagined worlds

Portrait of Remedios Varo by Walter Gruen. Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.
Named after a Catholic saint, spirituality and mysticism became fundamental to Varo’s work
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.
Varo was a refugee and the experience of exile informed her perspective
Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Exploración de las fuentes del río Orinoco, 1959. Oil on canvas. 18 x 15¾ in. (45.7 x 40 cm). Sold for $1,273,000 on 19 November 2007 at Christie's in New York. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.
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.
Varo made her mark as a female artist in the male-dominated Surrealist world

Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Tailleur pour dames, 1957. Oil on board. 26 ¾ x 41 ¾ in. (68 x 106 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid
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.
Her best friend was Leonora Carrington

Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Homo Rodans, 1959. Chicken, fish and turkey bones, wire, and display case. Height: 16⅛ in (41 cm.; width: 6⅝ in (17 cm); depth: 2½ in (6.5 cm). Price on request. Offered through Christie's Privates Sales
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.
Science was important in Varo’s work

Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Planta insumisa, 1961. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid
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.
She would also spend hours focusing on objects, contemplating how they had come into existence

Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Creación con rayos astrales, 1955. Oil and tempera on Masonite. 26½ x 16¾ in (67.3 x 43 cm). Sold for $3,420,000 on 17 November 2022 at Christie’s in New York. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.
Renaissance and Surrealist techniques are at work in her art

Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Vampiros vegetarianos, 1962. Oil on canvas. 33¾ x 23¾ in (85.7 x 60.3 cm). Sold for $3,301,000 on 27 May 2015 at Christie's in New York. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.
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.
Her alter ego was a cat

Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Simpatía (La rabia del gato), 1955. Oil on Masonite. 37¾ x 33½ in (95.9 x 85.1 cm). Sold for $3,135,000 on 22 May 2019 at Christie’s in New York. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.
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 her most valuable work at the end of her life, whilst living in Mexico

Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Retrato del Doctor Ignacio Chávez, 1957. Oil on Masonite. 37¼ x 24⅜ in (94.6 x 61.9 cm). Sold for 3,882,000 on 28 February 2023 at Christie’s in London. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.
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.
The market for Varo’s works is surging

Remedios Varo (1908-1963), The Juggler (The Magician), 1956. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.
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.
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