Art Appreciation
Remedios Varo was born on December 16, 1908, in Anglés, Girona, Spain, into a family split between her father’s rational, engineering mindset and her mother’s strict Catholic devotion. Her father trained her eye with technical drawings and frequent museum visits, while convent schooling gave her a sense of confinement she later critiqued in her art. She entered the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid in 1924, receiving rigorous academic training in drawing, anatomy, and traditional oil painting.
In Madrid she encountered Surrealism as it spread through Spain’s avant-garde circles. Time spent in the Prado brought her into close contact with the fantastical worlds of Hieronymus Bosch and the psychological darkness of Francisco Goya, as well as the elongated, spiritual figures of El Greco—sources she later cited as crucial to her visual imagination.
These older masters, filtered through Surrealism’s interest in dreams and the unconscious, shaped Varo’s mature style: meticulous, narrative paintings where alchemical laboratories, strange machines, and cloistered interiors become stages for inner transformation.
After graduating in 1930, Varo moved between Spain and France, working in commercial illustration and joining Barcelona’s logicofobista group, a local variant of Surrealism. The Spanish Civil War and later World War II forced her first to Paris—where she linked with André Breton’s circle—and then into exile in Mexico in 1941 with the poet Benjamin Péret.
In Mexico City she found stability and a vibrant community of artists and intellectuals, including Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna, and produced the majority of her now-celebrated paintings before her death in 1963.
Varo’s Mexican period fused European Surrealism with occultism, alchemy, science, and esoteric philosophies. Her paintings often feature androgynous or female protagonists engaged in experimentation, travel, or quiet rebellion—figures read as reflections of her own experience of exile and intellectual questing.
Works such as The Creation of the Birds (1957) and Embroidery of the Earth's Mantle (1961) show quasi-scientific women literally generating worlds from music, light, or thread, recasting the “mad scientist” as a thoughtful, self-directed female creator.
Technically, Varo relied heavily on graphite-on-paper drawings, often at exact scale, to plan her paintings; many drawings stand alone as finished works that reveal her precise draftsmanship. In oil she used thin glazes, fine brushes, and architectural perspective to achieve a crystalline, almost miniaturist clarity.
Feminist scholars argue that by centering women as active agents—rather than objects—within these intricate worlds, Varo quietly subverted the male-dominated Surrealist canon. Paintings like Papilla Estelar (Celestial Pablum, 1958), Towards the Tower (1961), and The Escape (1962) are now key texts in feminist art history as well as landmarks of 20th-century Surrealism.
Sources:
Wikipedia
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/varo-remedios
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Remedios-Varo
https://nmwa.org/art/artists/remedios-varo/
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/remedios-varo-painter-of-magic
https://student-journals.ucl.ac.uk/opticon/article/1004/galley/958/view/
https://www.christies.com/en/stories/ten-things-to-know-about-remedios-varo-1bd7c9dd53c74b0a88f1c820a74fbfaf
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https://pwdgkr.medium.com/surrealism-and-the-art-of-remedios-varo-4758d0065fe0
https://www.artchive.com/artwork/towards-the-tower-remedios-varo/
https://www.reddit.com/r/museum/comments/1548tz3/remedios_varo_the_escape_1961/
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