Remedios Varo: The Complete Story
Remedios Varo (1908-1963) was the Spanish-born Surrealist who rebuilt her life in Mexico City and painted meticulous small worlds of alchemists, towers and impossible machines, and she only painted full time for her last ten years.
Those ten years were enough to make her one of the most loved painters in Mexico.
Remedios Varo at a glance
1908. Born in Anglès, Catalonia. Her father was a hydraulic engineer whose technical drawings she copied as a child.
1937. Left Spain for Paris with the poet Benjamin Péret as the civil war raged.
1941. Fled occupied France for Mexico City, her home for the rest of her life.
1956. First solo show in Mexico City, an immediate success.
1963. Died of a heart attack at 54, at the height of her powers.
An engineer's daughter
Born in Angles, in Catalonia, in 1908, Varo was the daughter of a hydraulic engineer who taught her technical drawing as a child, and the precision never left her hand. She trained at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, Dali's old school, then passed through Barcelona and Paris, where she joined the Surrealists alongside the poet Benjamin Peret.
Escape to Mexico
In 1941, fleeing occupied France, she reached Mexico City.
The exile became the home: with her closest friend, the painter Leonora Carrington, she formed one of the great creative friendships in modern art, the two women trading dreams, recipes and imagery for two decades.
To survive she painted advertisements, including campaigns for the Bayer pharmaceutical company, honing the miniaturist finish her mature work would use.
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The last ten years, one world
Only around 1953, in her mid-forties, could she paint full time.
What followed was a compressed golden age: hooded travellers pedalling absurd machines, women spinning the world's fabric from a tower, scientists bottling starlight.
Her first solo show, in Mexico City in 1956, sold out and made her famous almost overnight. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1963, at 54, at the peak of her powers.
Drawing mosquitoes in Caracas
From 1947 to 1949 Varo lived in Venezuela, drawing insects with technical precision for a public health campaign.
Mosquitoes, rendered like her father’s engineering plans.
The discipline shows in the paintings that followed: every machine, pulley, and wheel in her Mexico canvases actually looks like it would work.
Advertising, signed Uranga
For years in Mexico she paid the bills painting advertisements, including for the pharmaceutical house Bayer.
Some of the commercial work she signed with her mother’s family name, Uranga, keeping her own for the real thing.
Collectors now hunt the Bayer pieces too.
Recipes for dreams
Varo wrote as she painted: letters to strangers, invented scientific reports, and a recipe to provoke erotic dreams involving a hen, garlic, and honey among its ingredients.
Most of it stayed in drawers during her lifetime.
The writings were published after her death and read exactly like her paintings sound.
The myth to retire
For decades she was filed as a Surrealist wife, a footnote to the men she lived among. The paintings ended the argument: technically flawless, utterly hers, and now fought over. In 2020 her Armonia sold for 6.2 million dollars, a record for her, and in 2023 the Art Institute of Chicago gave her a major solo exhibition.
Where to see Varo
The Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City holds the largest collection of her work, some forty pieces, and shows it with the devotion of a shrine. Her paintings rarely travel, which makes Mexico City the pilgrimage.
The Remedios Varo questions that keep coming up
What is Remedios Varo famous for? Precise, dreamlike paintings of alchemists, towers and fantastic machines.
Was she part of the Surrealists? Yes, in Paris with Benjamin Peret, then at the heart of the exiled group in Mexico.
Who was her closest friend? The painter Leonora Carrington; their twenty-year friendship shaped both bodies of work.
Where can I see her paintings? The Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, which holds about forty works.
Did Varo do commercial work? Yes. She painted advertising in Mexico, including for Bayer, signing some of it Uranga, her mother’s family name.
What did Varo do in Venezuela? From 1947 to 1949 she made scientific drawings of insects in Caracas for a public health campaign, precision work that fed straight back into her painting.
More secrets to unlock
A queue around the block
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.
