Maria de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was a Spanish-born Mexican surrealist painter working in Spain, France, and Mexico.
54 Facts About Remedios Varo
2.
Remedios Varo Uranga was born in 1908 in Angles, a small town in the province of Girona, in northeastern Spain.
3.
Remedios Varo's mother, Ignacia Uranga Bergareche, had been born to Basque parents in Argentina; she was a devout Roman Catholic.
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Remedios Varo's mother named her newborn in honor of the patron saint of Angles, Virgen de los Remedios, after a recently deceased older sister.
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Remedios Varo would have two surviving siblings: an older brother Rodrigo, and another brother Luis.
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Remedios Varo was the only girl, and the youngest of the three siblings.
7.
Remedios Varo's father, Rodrigo Remedios Varo y Zajalvo, was a hydraulic engineer.
8.
Remedios Varo's father recognized her artistic talents early on and would have her copy the technical drawings of his work with their straight lines, radii, and perspectives, which she reproduced meticulously.
9.
Remedios Varo encouraged independent thought and supplemented her education with science and adventure books, notably the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe.
10.
Remedios Varo took a critical view of religion, rejecting the religious ideology of her childhood education, and instead hewed to the liberal and universalist ideas that her father instilled in her.
11.
Remedios Varo drew throughout her childhood and painted her first painting at age twelve.
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Remedios Varo was awarded her diploma as a drawing teacher in 1930.
13.
Remedios Varo exhibited in a collective exhibition organized by the Union de Dibujantes de Madrid.
14.
Remedios Varo was a regular visitor to the Prado Museum and took particular interest in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, most notably The Garden of Earthly Delights, as well as other artists, such as Francisco de Goya.
15.
The work that Remedios Varo created from 1926 to 1935 solidified her career as an artist, but was not seen by the public.
16.
Remedios Varo met her first husband Gerardo Lizarraga at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, and married him in San Sebastian in 1930.
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In 1935, Remedios Varo participated in a drawing exhibition in Madrid, which displayed her Composicion.
18.
Remedios Varo soon separated from her husband and shared a studio with Frances in a neighborhood filled with young avant-garde artists.
19.
That same year, along with Jean and his artist friends, Dominguez and Frances, Remedios Varo took part in various surrealist games such as cadavres exquis that were meant to explore the subconscious association of participants by pairing different images at random.
20.
Remedios Varo soon joined a collective of artists and writers, called the Grupo Logicofobista, who had an interest in Surrealism and wanted to unite art together with metaphysics, while resisting logic and reason.
21.
Remedios Varo exhibited with this group in 1936 at the Galeria Catalonia although she recognized they were not pure Surrealists.
22.
Shortly after arriving in France, Remedios Varo took part in the International Surrealist exhibitions in Paris and in Amsterdam in 1938.
23.
Remedios Varo drew vignettes for the Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme; the magazines Trajectoire du Reve, Visage du Monde, and Minotaure featured her work.
24.
Apparently, this led to very interesting psychological implications that Remedios Varo later used in her paintings many times.
25.
In 1937, Remedios Varo met political activist and artist Esteban Frances, and left her first husband behind to flee the Spanish Civil War.
26.
Remedios Varo moved back to Paris with both Frances and the poet Benjamin Peret in order to escape from the political unrest and fighting, and shared a studio with them there.
27.
In Paris, Remedios Varo lived in poverty, working odd jobs and having to copy and even to forge paintings in order to get by.
28.
Remedios Varo initially considered her time in Mexico to be temporary.
29.
Remedios Varo worked as an assistant to Marc Chagall with the design of the costumes for the production of the ballet Aleko, which premiered in Mexico City in 1942.
30.
Remedios Varo worked at other jobs, including in publicity for the pharmaceutical company Bayer, and decorating for Clar Decor.
31.
In 1947, Peret returned to Paris, and Remedios Varo traveled to Venezuela.
32.
Remedios Varo returned to Mexico in 1949 and began her third and last important relationship, with Austrian political refugee Walter Gruen, who had endured concentration camps before escaping from Europe.
33.
In 1955, Remedios Varo opened her first solo exhibition at the Galeria Diana in Mexico City, which was well received.
34.
Remedios Varo's second showing was at the Salon de la Arte de Mujer in 1958.
35.
In 1963, Remedios Varo suddenly died of a heart attack; she had been a heavy smoker.
36.
Remedios Varo was influenced by styles as diverse as those of Francisco Goya, El Greco, Picasso, and Braque.
37.
Remedios Varo's paintings reflected the painstaking precision drawing skills which she had learned early in life.
38.
Remedios Varo considered surrealism as an "expressive resting place within the limits of Cubism, and as a way of communicating the incommunicable".
39.
Remedios Varo differed from other Surrealists because of her constant use of religion in her work.
40.
Remedios Varo turned to a wide range of mystic and hermetic traditions, both Western and non-Western, for influence.
41.
Remedios Varo was influenced by her belief in magic and animistic faiths.
42.
Remedios Varo was very connected to nature and believed that there was strong relation between the plant, human, animal, and mechanical world.
43.
Remedios Varo was aware of the importance of biology, chemistry, physics, and botany, and thought it should blend together with other aspects of life.
44.
Remedios Varo 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.
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Remedios Varo saw in each of these an avenue to self-knowledge and the transformation of consciousness.
46.
Some of Remedios Varo's art elevated women, while still falling under the category of Surrealism.
47.
Remedios Varo often painted images of women in confined spaces, achieving a sense of isolation.
48.
Remedios Varo often depicted herself through these key features in her paintings, regardless of the figure's gender.
49.
Remedios Varo's work focuses on psychoanalysis and its role in society and female agency.
50.
Remedios Varo's artwork is well known in Mexico, but is not as well known throughout the rest of the world.
51.
Remedios Varo has painted images of isolated, androgynous, auto-biographical figures to highlight the captivity of the true woman.
52.
The Crying of Lot 49, a novella by Thomas Pynchon, features a scene in which the main character recalls crying in front of a painting by Remedios Varo titled Bordando el Manto Terrestre.
53.
Remedios Varo's painting The Lovers served as inspiration for some of the images used by Madonna in the music video for her 1995 single "Bedtime Story".
54.
On 22 May 2019 Remedios Varo's 1955 painting Simpatia sold for $3.1 million at an auction at Christie's, New York City.