Remedios Varo (1908-1963) was a Surrealist painter of Spanish origin who became a naturalized Mexican citizen. Fleeing the Spanish Civil War and then war-torn Europe, she settled in Mexico City, where she developed a dreamlike body of work blending alchemy, science and mysticism.
Remedios Varo(1908 — 1963)
Remedios Varo Uranga
Espagne
6 min read
Frequently asked questions
Key Facts
- Born in 1908 in Anglès (Catalonia, Spain), trained at the San Fernando Academy in Madrid
- Fled the Spanish Civil War and joined the Surrealist circles in Paris during the 1930s
- Went into exile in Mexico City in 1941 to escape the Nazi occupation, where she became close friends with Leonora Carrington
- From the 1950s onward developed her mature style: dreamlike scenes with elongated figures blending science, alchemy and magic
- Died prematurely in 1963 in Mexico City, at the height of her artistic recognition
Works & Achievements
Central panel of a triptych showing young girls confined in a tower, embroidering the world itself; an emblematic work about confinement and creation.
Panel of the triptych depicting an escape aboard a fantastical vessel, a symbol of emancipation and the quest for freedom.
A half-woman, half-owl figure gives life to the birds she paints: an allegory of the creative act linking art, nature, and alchemy.
A painting tinged with critical humor about the fashion for psychoanalysis, in which a woman throws a mask into a well.
A figure composes a musical score by pinning objects and plants onto a staff, illustrating the search for a secret order of the world.
First panel of the autobiographical triptych showing boarders leaving a convent on bicycles, led by a nun.
An illustrated parodic text and a sculpture made of bones, a fake scientific study on human evolution, showcasing her erudite humor.
Anecdotes
As a child, Remedios Varo accompanied her father, a hydraulic engineer, to his construction sites across Spain and North Africa. He taught her technical drawing and perspective, and encouraged her to copy out his blueprints: this almost scientific precision would later reappear in her paintings filled with strange machines.
In Paris during the 1930s, Remedios Varo took part in **André Breton**'s Surrealist group alongside her companion, the poet **Benjamin Péret**. She joined in collective games such as the *cadavre exquis* (“exquisite corpse”), in which each artist draws part of a figure without seeing what the others have done.
Fleeing the advance of the Nazi troops, Varo was interned for a time in France at the start of the Second World War before she was able to set sail in **1941** for Mexico, which was then welcoming many Spanish and European refugees.
In Mexico, Remedios Varo formed a deep friendship with the British painter **Leonora Carrington**. The two women shared a passion for alchemy, the occult sciences, fairy tales and experimental cooking, inventing together whimsical, almost magical recipes.
Varo worked with meticulous slowness, preparing her panels like the old masters and sometimes using unusual techniques: she would blow on the wet paint or press materials onto it to create textures, blending the rigour of the technical drawing she had learned from her father with the freest imagination.
Primary Sources
In it, Varo expresses her world blending humor, science, and mysticism, writing letters addressed to invented recipients and describing imaginary worlds governed by strange laws.
Varo describes her triptych as the story of a young girl escaping a convent-boarding school: an autobiographical tale transposed onto the quest for emancipation and freedom.
Under the pseudonym of an imaginary scholar, Varo invents a parody of an anthropology treatise tracing the evolution of a “wheel-man,” blending feigned erudition with absurd fantasy.
Key Places
Birthplace of Remedios Varo, where she was born in 1908 into an engineer's family.
Fine arts school where Varo received a rigorous academic training in the 1920s.
City where she joined the Surrealist movement in the late 1930s before fleeing the war.
Land of exile and artistic flourishing where Varo lived from 1941 until her death and created the bulk of her work.
City where she stayed in the late 1940s, working as a scientific illustrator for a public health campaign.
