Remedios Varo

Dream worlds and scientific exploration merge with magical thinking in Remedios Varo's incredible, surreal imagery. With a unique blend of precision and poetry, the Spanish-Mexican artist conjured a universe of fantastical interiors and imaginary landscapes inhabited by mysterious musicians, eccentric scientists, and enigmatic travelers.

Louisiana presents the first ever major museum exhibition in Europe of surrealist Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963). Following a first encounter with Varo’s art as part of the ‘Fantastic Women’ show in 2020, this time the museum will focus on and unfold her entire and fascinating life’s work.

Remedios Varo, who declared that “the dream world and the real world are the same,” attempted to combine vastly different techniques, ideas, and fantasies in an almost alchemical manner in her paintings, which have an enigmatic, cinematic character often incorporating hybrid creatures.

She used the random processes of surrealism, but was at the same time incredibly precise, meticulous, and classical in her painterly expression and in her colour approach, which has clear relations to Italian painting from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

Varo’s sources of inspiration therefore range from, for example, Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne and Niels Bohr to the Armenian philosopher and occult teacher Gurdjieff. She was also a feminist and formulated her own surrealist idiom, which is based on a feminine world of experience and ideas about female creativity and empowerment.

It was not until 1949 that she was able to seriously engage in painting, and a few years later her marriage to the Austrian emigrant Walter Gruen meant that she did not have to worry about finances. Her closest friends – and collaborators – became the British artist Leonora Carrington and the Hungarian photojournalist Kati Horna. They were so close that they were referred to as “the three witches”. The portrait above of Varo was taken by Horna in 1957, while Carrington made the mask she wears.

Remedios Varo achieved enormous success with her paintings, but since each one took a long time to make, her production was not large, and people signed up for a waiting list for her works. She died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of only 54. André Breton, who is considered the spiritual father figure of surrealism, paid tribute to her with the words: “The sorceress has left us too soon”.

The aim of the exhibition is to invite visitors on a journey through Remedios Varo’s highly original pictorial universe by illuminating the themes that make her work so distinctive and higly relevant today. On display will be more than 70 works, early ones from the artist’s time in Barcelona and Paris as well as from her most productive period in Mexico in the 1950s and early 60s.

Drawings, notebooks and documentary material from the time will be included to provide a broad introduction to an artist who might still be relatively unknown in this part of the world, but whose work continues to inspire and challenge our perception of reality.