Remedios Varo

(Spain, 16/12/1908 - 08/10/1963)

Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River (1959)

To enter the Surrealist world, and learn its new language, one had only to renounce the dictates of reason and reality in an embrace of the ineffable. But, for Varo, alongside the likes of Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, locating woman’s creative unconscious required that she invented her own brand of Surrealism based on the fairy tales, legends and magical properties of artistic creation she learnt from art galleries and museums across Spain. Practicing on her own terms and creating her alchemical and divinatory images for her own spiritual knowledge, accessible only to the initiated, without the need for the inspiration of the femme-enfant or muse.

Born in Spain to a devoutly Catholic mother, Varo attended a convent school from the age of eight which instilled an enduring fascination with mysticism and metaphysical inquiry, although it was through her father, a hydraulic engineer, that she was first introduced to the geometric, machine-like forms that became integral to her visual vocabulary.

In 1924, Varo began her formal studies at the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, where she took elective classes in scientific drawing alongside the prerequisites of painting and drawing. While this traditional academic education grounded her in classical technique, her early exposure to avant-garde currents in Madrid and Barcelona in the 1930s prompted an increasing interest in experimental art forms.

During this period, Varo participated in the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition and became associated with the group of Spanish Surrealists known as the Logicophobists, who sought to reconcile rational thought with the intuitive and the irrational.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Varo left Spain and settled in Paris in 1937 and joined the circle of Surrealists based in the city. It was here that she first met Leonora Carrington with whom she became close friends and intellectual collaborator, sharing a sustained engagement with alchemical symbolism and Eastern religions. By this time, Varo began stating she was born in 1913, instead of 1908, possibly in an attempt to fit with the Surrealist ideal of the femme-enfant, and this change would later be engraved onto her gravestone.

Following the German occupation of Paris and the imprisonment of her husband, Benjamin Péret, for his political activities, the pair fled to Mexico in 1941 where she found both refuge and the creative stimulus of a cosmopolitan yet spiritually charged environment in which her artistic vision could mature.

By the early 1950s, Varo had developed a distinctive pictorial language characterised by androgynous figures engaged in acts of scientific, mystical and creative transformation, with her compositions employing allegorical narratives to synthesise technology, reality, mysticism and spirituality.

With her gender-ambiguous subjects act as alchemists, inventors and travellers, Varo's work embodies the integration of intellect and intuition and articulates her deeply personal cosmology grounded in the pursuit of knowledge and transcendence. In this respect, her work departs from the Freudian preoccupations of European Surrealism, aligning more closely with hermetic and mystical traditions.

In 1956, Varo held her first solo exhibition at the Galería Diana in Mexico City, with her work being in such demand that she had to begin waiting list for buyers. Now established within Mexico’s artistic milieu, her work was featured in exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City and New York.

Critical recognition of Varo’s work grew rapidly after her untimely death from a heart attack, and posthumous retrospectives have secured her position as one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century Surrealism with her work attracting record-breaking attendance at exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1971, 1983 and 1994. Today, Varo’s work continues to inform discourses on gender, exile and the metaphysical dimensions of art, situating her among the most intellectually and artistically rigorous painters of her generation. 

Image: Remedios Varo, Exploración de las Fuentes del Río Orinoco (Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River) (1959). Private collection.