Kati Horna, Portrait of Remedios Varo in her studio, 1963 © Norah Horna; Image courtesy of Walter Gruen
Mexican-Catalan surrealist artist María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was born in Angles, in Catalonia, on16 December 1908 in a home with a staunch Catholic mother and a free spirited father who was a hydraulic engineer. Her mother named her in honour of the patron saint of Anglès, Virgen de los Remedios (the Virgin of Remedies), after a recently deceased older sister.
Varo was heavily influenced by father, who taught her to draw, and her strict Catholic schooling, against which she rebelled. Varo took a critical view of formal religion, rejecting the dominant ideology of her childhood education, and hewed to the liberal and universalist ideas that her father had instilled in her. Catholicism still came to bear great influence on her work, and she often differed from surrealist contemporaries with these frequent religious references.
It was her father who taught her to draw and supported her desire to become an artist. She was only 15 years old when she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, and during the 1920s she was influenced bt the city's artistic avant-garde, including Lorca, and pursued surrealism and political change.
Varo moved to Barcelona in the mid-1930s and joined the Surrealist avant-garde art group Logicophobista. The increasing unrest in Spain in the 1930s led her to travel to Paris, where she became involved in surrealist circles. In Paris, Varo became deeply involved with the Paris-based Surrealists, associated and exhibited with them, exploring magic, alchemy, and analytical psychology. and 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: Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Tokyo, 1936), Surrealist Objects & Poems (London, 1937), Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Paris, 1938), Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo (Mexico City, 1940), to name a few.
She had an unconventional personal life involving multiple lovers and partners, and often worked odd jobs or even forged paintings in order to remain independent.
Encountering many events of political unrest throughout her life, she was frequently starting afresh.In 1939, the Nationalists claimed victory in Spain and Francisco Franco disallowed anyone associated with the Republicans from entering the country. Varo became permanently unable to return to her home and was isolated from her family. This deeply affected her and was a source of pain and regret throughout her life.
After World War II began, the poet Benjamin Péret was arrested by the French government for his political beliefs, he was a member of the Trotskyist POUM and Varo was imprisoned as his romantic partner.
A few days after Varo was freed, the Germans seized Paris, and she was forced to join other refugees leaving the city. In 1941 Varo boarded the Serpa Pinto in Marseilles to flee Nazi-dominated Europe. The terrors she experienced in her earlier years impacted her significantly.
She moved to Mexico in 1942 where she remained for the rest of her life, “in this country I have found the tranquility that I have always searched for”.
She settled in Mexico City and became part of a vibrant community of Mexican and European artists who drew inspiration from Mexico’s culture and geography, among other things and connected with other exiled artists such as Alice Rahon, Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford.
However, because Mexican muralism still dominated the country’s art scene, surrealism was generally not well received. While there is little overt influence of Mexican art on her work, Varo and other surrealists were captivated by the seemingly porous borders between the marvellous and the real in Mexico. Varo also turned to a wide range of mystic and hermetic traditions, encompassing her belief in magic and animistic faiths.
She felt connected to nature and often illustrated the relationships between plant, human, animal, and mechanical worlds. Her fascination with science including Einstein’s theory of relativity and Darwinian evolution, has been noted by admirers of her art.
She turned with equal interest to the ideas of Carl Jung as to the theories of George Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Helena Blavatsky, Meister Eckhart, and the Sufis, and was as fascinated with the legend of the Holy Grail as with sacred geometry, witchcraft, alchemy, and the I Ching.
Referred to as a ‘sorceress‘, Varo expressed her beliefs on witchcraft in a letter to English author Gerald Gardner:
“personally, I don’t believe I am endowed with any special powers, but instead with an ability to see relationships of cause and effect differently, and this beyond the ordinary limits of common logic.”
She often portrayed the spiritual journey as a solitary one—her characters are seekers, travellers, experimenters. They are caught mid-process: studying, weaving, conjuring, floating through celestial corridors. This speaks not only to the esoteric traditions she admired, but to her personal understanding of the artist as a kind of spiritual scientist,working in secret, transmuting inner experience into vision. Her technical precision,detailed brushwork, refined draughtsmanship, and softly glowing light—supports the illusion of reality while simultaneously making the fantastic feel entirely plausible. The world she presents is not chaotic or dreamlike in the Freudian sense; it is structured, meaningful, filled with laws, tools, and rituals.
It suggests a universe governed by hidden logic, one that can be glimpsed through spiritual discipline and creative work.
Varo’s work resonates with the Hermetic principle of “as above, so below.”
Her paintings frequently mirror cosmic and microcosmic scales—machines that replicate the movements of the stars, beings whose actions influence distant realms. This idea of correspondence reflects her belief that the inner world is not separate from the outer, but a reflection of it, and that art can illuminate that hidden correspondence.
Her closest friends and collaborators in Mexico became the British artist Leonora Carringtonhttps://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-magical-world-of-surrealist-leonora.html and the Hungarian photojournalist Kati Horna. They were so close that they were referred to as “the three witches”.
The portrait above of Varo was taken by Horna in 1957, while Carrington made the mask she wears.
Carrington and Varo formed one of the great creative friendships in modern art, the two women trading dreams, recipes and imagery for two decades.
Carrington had her own harrowing route to Mexico first, including a breakdown that landed her in a Spanish psychiatric asylum in 1940.
Despite widespread belief, Remedios Varo never became a Mexican citizen. Though she never returned to her homeland, she kept her Spanish citizenship, unlike her friend Leonora Carrington, who was naturalized as citizen of Mexico.[
During her early years in Mexico City, Varo honed her distinctive painting style while working various odd jobs, most notably creating illustrations for the pharmaceutical firm Casa Bayer between 1942 and 1949.
It was not until 1949 that she was able to seriously engage in painting, and a few years later her marriage to the Austrian emigrant Walter Gruen meant that she did not have to worry about finances.
In the same period she began to develop her mature personal style. During succeeding decades, she devoted increased time and energy to her art, and she delved further into the fantastical sources that captured her imagination.
Remedios Varo, who declared that “the dream world and the real world are the same,” attempted to combine vastly different techniques, ideas, and fantasies in an almost alchemical manner in her paintings, which have an enigmatic, cinematic character often incorporating hybrid creatures.
She used the random processes of surrealism, but was at the same time incredibly precise, meticulous, and classical in her painterly expression and in her colour approach, which has clear relations to Italian painting from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
Tyveri af substans, 1955. Photo: Alex Aldaco.
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 and androgynous figures (often disguised portraits of Varo herself), mystical narrative content, and a quality of ambiguity, mystery, and dark humor.
“Everything that she did or undid, however disparate that looked to an observer with prejudices, was done for what should be done, that is, with courage and without fear of consequences.” - Remedios Varo,
Remedios Varo. Nightmare, 1947.
In this last decade of her career, she developed a unique and virtuosic painting style that paired detailed preparatory drawings and meticulous rendering of her primary subjects in the tradition of early Renaissance masters, with Surrealist-derived automatic techniques like decalcomania.
The feminist dimension also occupies an essential place in Remedios Varo's career. The artist developed a conception of surrealism far removed from the dominant models of her time and formulated an imagery based on experiences, concerns, and forms of creativity linked to the female condition. Her protagonists, especially the female figures, often appear as creators, explorers, scientists, or alchemists capable of transforming their environment. In this sense, her work can be read as a vindication of women's imagination and creative capacity in the face of cultural structures that had historically limited their autonomy.
Remedios Varo’s art is often read as a proto-feminist response to the overwhelmingly male voices of Surrealism.While Varo did not directly deem her work ‘feminist’, it was noted that “she stretches the limits of and directly challenges confabulated, patriarchal ideals of femininity”, as well as frequently focusing on female empowerment and agency. The androgynous figures characteristic of her later pieces also challenge gender, in that the figures do not fall neatly into normative categories.
One critic stated, “because the female body, a sacred erotic artistic space, is transformed by Varo into non-gendered shapes and forms, namely animals and insects, the space becomes freed from monolithic sexual interpretation.”
While André Breton and his circle frequently depicted women as muses, objects of desire, or conduits to the unconscious, Varo reoriented this visual language. In her canvases, women are creators, seekers, and alchemists in their own right.
Varo’s female figures are never passive. Instead, they actively shape their surroundings, wielding brushes, flasks, or arcane instruments. In La creación de las aves (The Creation of the Birds, 1957), the central figure (half-woman, half-owl) acts as a cosmic artist, channeling starlight into her creations. This image redefines creativity as a distinctly female, mystical power rather than a patriarchal privilege. Similarly, in La llamada (The Call, 1961), a robed woman strides through architectural ruins with flaming hair, embodying enlightenment and agency. Domestic interiors, often coded in patriarchal society as sites of confinement, become in Varo’s hands spaces of experimentation and transformation. Kitchens, workshops, and bedrooms are transfigured into alchemical laboratories or portals to other worlds. By transforming the symbols of domesticity into metaphors of power, Varo blurred the boundary between the everyday and the magical, elevating women’s traditional spaces to arenas of liberation.
At the height of an era dominated by the great muralists, she created an inner universe that was meticulous and deeply intellectual. Her work serves as a bridge between science, alchemy, tarot, philosophy, botany, and astronomy.
She was one of the first to place woman at the center of surrealism, not as a muse, but as a creator, scientist, and sorceress, demonstrating that art can be a laboratory for understanding the soul.
In 1956, Varo had her first major solo exhibition in Mexico City, and it catapulted her to the forefront of the art scene. She continued to exhibit widely thereafter.
Remedios Varo. Armonía. 1956.
Her interest in bankers may be specifically tied to her Mexican context. The 1960s was a period of economic stability and growth in Mexico. She may have intended the bankers to be symbols of authority or social conformity, which the female character appears to avoid. Like many of her late works,Banqueros has an assertive, protofeminist charge and carry echoes of her own experience of migration and exile.
Banqueros en acción reveals Varo’s bold imagination and multidisciplinary study.
Her premature death of a heart attack on 8 October 1963 at the age of 54 in Mexico City occurred as she was reaching new renown.André Breton, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/09/andre-breton-1921896-28966.html who is considered the spiritual father figure of surrealism, paid tribute to her with the words: “The sorceress has left us too soon”.
Remedios Varo, "Bordando el manto terrestre" ("Embroidering the Earth's Mantle"), 1961
Eight years after her death, her 1971 retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno drew record crowds for the museum. The city she had arrived in as a refugee queued around the block for her.
Varo created roughly 400 works of art, over half of them drawings, which are now globally dispersed. Walter Gruen donated 38 significant artworks to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.
In 2023, Varo was the subject of the solo exhibition Remedios Varo: Science Fictions at the Art Institute of Chicago. In fall 2026, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark staged the first ever major solo museum exhibition in Europe dedicated to her work.
Varo's work has been acquired by museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. She has had solo shows at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2000); Mexican Fine Arts Museum, Chicago, (2000); Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (1971, 1983, 1994, 2001, 2016, 2018); and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba), Argentina (2020).
Varo's work has been included in many group museum exhibitions, including Surrealism: Desire Unbound, Tate Modern Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2001); In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (2012); Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Campo Cerrado: Spanish Art 1939-1953, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2016); The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2018); Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2020) and Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2020); Surrealism Beyond Borders, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021) and Tate Modern, London (2022); Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2022) and Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (2022); and the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022).
Remedios Varo remains a fundamental figure in Surrealism and one of the most transcendent artists of the 20th century.Her legacy is that of the visionary as alchemist. She created a body of work that maps the spiritual journey not in abstraction, but in metaphor and image, tender, luminous, and filled with reverence for the hidden workings of the universe.
She is celebrated for her paintings that combine ideas of the occult, mysticism, psychoanalysis, astrology,alchemy, esotericism and science. In her art, we are invited not just to observe, but to awaken.Her images blending nature with the built environment and feature characters and open-ended narratives that reflected her life and times. 63 years after her passing, lets remember her.
