Unexpected journeys: the art and life of Remedios Varo

Abstract

This is a biography of Remedios Varo, a Surrealist painter based on interviews with the artist's family, close friends and fellow artists. The author also draws on the family's extensive archives and research in Mexico, Europe and North Africa. From her wandering childhood in Spain to her final years of intense creativity in Mexico City, Remedios Varo lived a life filled with adventures as strange as the scenes she rendered. Tapping into sources as diverse as alchemy and physics, mysticism and engineering, mythology and mathematics, she created evocative, jewel-like images whose power is reinforced by her highly precise technique. The greatest influence on her art and life was Surrealism, which she first encountered in Barcelona and later pursued in Paris where she was married to the Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, and where her long, collaborative friendship with Leonora Carrington began. Varo had a war-haunted life - she moved to Paris to escape the Spanish Civil War, then barely escaped France during the Nazi occupation - and had intense romantic involvements with three husbands and numerous lovers. She settled in Mexico in 1942, where she remained - and was passionately admired - until her death in 1963.