María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga

About

Remedios Varo was a Catalan surrealist painter born in 1908 in Anglès, Spain, who became a central figure in the Mexico City-based Surrealist movement. Raised by a Catholic mother and an agnostic engineer father, these contrasting spiritual and scientific influences profoundly shaped her artistic vision. After moving to Paris in 1935, she engaged with the European Surrealist circle, meeting André Breton and collaborating with artists like Leonora Carrington and Roberto Matta. She fled Nazi-occupied France in 1941 and settled in Mexico, where she achieved her greatest recognition. Varo's mature work, produced primarily in the last decade of her life beginning in the mid-1950s, synthesized Surrealist automatic techniques with meticulous Renaissance-inspired draftsmanship. Her paintings featured enigmatic androgynous figures, mystical narratives, alchemical imagery, and architectural elements referencing medieval art. She drew inspiration from Hiëronymus Bosch, Russian mystics Peter Ouspensky and George Gurdjieff, magic, alchemy, and psychoanalysis. Her first major solo exhibition in Mexico City in 1956 catapulted her to prominence, and she continued exhibiting widely until her death from a heart attack in 1963 at age 54.

Surrealism with elements of alchemy, mysticism, and Renaissance technical precision; characterized by enigmatic androgynous figures, dreamlike atmospheres, magical and scientific imagery, and detailed architectural elements