HUMLEBK.- The Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963) is the subject of a major retrospective opening at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark on 18 September, marking the first presentation of her work on this scale in Europe. In recent years, Varo has attracted renewed attention as one of Surrealism’s most original figures and a pioneering feminist artist. The exhibition features the artist’s most significant works on loan from museums in Mexico and the US alongside key works from private collections that are rarely exhibited publicly.
With her singular blend of precision and poetry, Remedios Varo conjures a Surrealist world of mysterious musicians, eccentric scientists, strange contraptions and enigmatic travellers inhabiting imaginary landscapes and uncanny interiors. Visitors can explore her captivating images in the Louisiana’s upcoming exhibition, a timely introduction to an artist who remains largely unknown in Northern Europe.
“The dream world and the real world are the same,” declared Remedios Varo, who is known for alchemically combining traditional techniques and Surrealist methods with mystical philosophical inquiry into visionary narratives. Her style – exact, meticulous and classical – reaches back to late medieval and early Renaissance painting.
Varo was a curious and exploratory artist who drew inspiration from a wide range of fields of knowledge, including alchemy, astronomy, quantum physics, psychology, technological innovation, esoteric traditions and spiritual practices. With meticulous technical precision, she created a universe in which the cosmic and the everyday converge with dreamlike openness and disarming humour. Her works challenge our perception of reality, making it difficult to tell whether we are looking into a distant past or a world yet to come.
Varo was also unequivocally a feminist, articulating a unique Surrealist vocabulary rooted in female experience and ideas of feminine creativity and self-determination. Challenging traditional notions of women’s place in society, she envisioned forms of female spirituality and intellectual autonomy.
The exhibition will present 70 works, complemented by photographs, notebooks and personal artefacts, spanning from Varo’s early years in Barcelona and Paris to her to her peak productive period in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s. While broadly chronological in structure, the exhibition also highlights key themes and lines of development of Varo’s artistic practice.
In 2020, five works by Varo were showcased in the Louisiana’s Fantastic Women exhibition, a presentation of women Surrealists.
Mara de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was born in northern Spain in 1908 and grew up in a home with a devout Catholic mother and a father who was a hydraulic engineer and a freethinker. He taught her how to draw and supported her desire to become an artist.
At 15, she became one of the first women admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. In the 1920s, she rubbed elbows with local avant-garde artists, including the poet and playwright Federico Garca Lorca, the film director Luis Buuel and the artist Salvador Dal. Because of the growing political unrest in Spain in the 1930s, she moved to Paris, where she joined the Surrealist circle. After the Nazi invasion of Paris, she fled to Marseille and was among the artists rescued from France in 1941.
Varo settled in Mexico City with her partner, the Surrealist poet Benjamin Pret, becoming part of a vibrant community of Mexican and European artists inspired by Mexico’s culture and landscape. Alongside her painting, she initially made a living by producing commercial illustrations, restoring pre-Columbian art and decorating furniture.
In the early 1950s, she began a relationship with the Austrian migr Walter Gruen, which gave her the freedom to dedicate herself to her painting without financial concern. Her closest friends – and collaborators – were the British artist Leonora Carrington and the Hungarian photojournalist Kati Horna.
Her first solo exhibition in 1956 proved a decisive artistic breakthrough. The exhibition was met with critical acclaim, every work sold within days, and demand for her paintings was such that collectors joined waiting lists. Just a few years later, in 1963, Varo died suddenly at the age of 54, at the peak of her career. Andr Breton described her as “a sorceress who left us too soon”.
