Alchemy, astronomy, mathematics, mysticism and the architecture of the Renaissance converge in the extraordinary paintings of Remedios Varo. One of Surrealism’s most intellectually ambitious artists, she created an entire visual universe in which imagination became a method of investigating reality.
In Remedios Varo’s Creation of the Birds (1957), a curious creature with the face of an owl sits at a desk in a medieval-looking chamber, producing birds through an elaborate combination of painting, music and scientific apparatus. Light enters through the window and passes through an instrument that directs it onto the work. A mechanical device supplies pigment, while the artist holds a pen connected to a violin. As the birds are completed, they acquire life and fly away.
The painting is among the most extraordinary representations of artistic creation in twentieth-century art. Yet its subject extends far beyond the imagination of a fantastical painter. Varo has constructed a complete system in which the creation of life depends upon the interaction of light, sound, mathematics and material processes.
Everything appears governed by a comprehensible internal logic, even though the apparatus itself could never function in the physical world.
This was the essential achievement of Remedios Varo (1908–1963). She developed a form of painting in which the irrational did not simply interrupt reality but operated according to alternative principles of causation. Her strange machines, impossible buildings and mysterious protagonists inhabit environments whose laws remain elusive but whose existence seems entirely convincing.
The result was a remarkable synthesis of Renaissance painting, Surrealist experimentation, scientific curiosity and esoteric philosophy.
The Engineer’s Daughter
Varo was born in Anglès, Catalonia, in 1908. Her father, Rodrigo Varo, was a hydraulic engineer whose profession required extensive travel throughout Spain and North Africa. He encouraged his daughter’s interest in mathematics and mechanical drawing, teaching her to reproduce technical plans with considerable precision.
This early training established a visual discipline that would remain evident throughout her career. The mechanisms depicted in her mature paintings may be impossible, but their construction is frequently rendered with the exactitude of an engineering diagram.
Her religious education provided a different intellectual inheritance. The Catholic schools she attended introduced her to the rituals, architecture and symbolic language of Christianity, although she increasingly resisted the authority of organised religion.
The collision between these formative experiences is visible throughout her work. Mechanical devices operate in monastic interiors; scientific experiments resemble religious ceremonies; and solitary figures undertake journeys that suggest both spiritual pilgrimage and intellectual discovery.
At fifteen, Varo entered the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, becoming one of its earliest female students. Her academic training introduced her to the technical traditions of European painting, particularly drawing, perspective and carefully controlled composition.
The influence of late medieval and early Renaissance art would prove especially important. Varo’s elongated figures, enclosed architectural spaces and meticulous handling of detail recall painters who used perspective and symbolic objects to construct images of spiritual reality.
Yet unlike the Renaissance artist working within an established Christian cosmology, Varo developed an intensely personal symbolic language.
Her paintings borrow the visual authority of religious and scientific images while refusing to accept the systems of belief that traditionally supported them.
Exile and the Freedom to Invent
During the 1930s, Varo became involved with the avant-garde in Barcelona and Paris. She participated in Surrealist experimentation, including collaborative techniques such as the cadavre exquis, or exquisite corpse, through which artists created unexpected compositions without seeing the entirety of their collaborators’ contributions.
Her association with André Breton’s Surrealist movement introduced her to automatic drawing, psychoanalysis and the belief that dreams and the unconscious could provide access to realities concealed by rational thought.
Political catastrophe subsequently transformed her life.
The Spanish Civil War made a return to Spain increasingly dangerous, and the German occupation of France forced her to flee Europe. In 1941 she arrived in Mexico with the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret.
Mexico became the setting in which she developed her mature artistic language.
She established a close friendship with British-born painter Leonora Carrington and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. The three women formed an unusually fertile intellectual circle, sharing interests in dreams, mythology, occult traditions and the relationship between imagination and everyday experience.
Varo and Carrington were especially close, experimenting with recipes, games, stories and invented rituals that blurred the boundaries between domestic life and artistic practice.
Their friendship represented something of a departure from the established conventions of European Surrealism.
Within Breton’s circle, women had often been idealised as muses, mysterious objects of desire or privileged intermediaries between the rational and unconscious worlds.
Varo’s female figures occupy a fundamentally different position. They investigate, invent, construct and transform. Rather than embodying mystery for someone else’s interpretation, they become its principal interpreters.
The Science of the Invisible
Varo’s interests extended across an exceptionally broad intellectual territory. She read about astronomy, physics, biology, psychology and mathematics, while exploring tarot, alchemy and the teachings of Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff.
Gurdjieff proposed that ordinary human consciousness operated in a condition of relative sleep and that deliberate attention might permit access to a more complete understanding of existence.
Varo was also interested in P. D. Ouspensky’s speculations about higher dimensions and the possibility that reality extended beyond the limits of ordinary perception.
These ideas intersected with contemporary developments in science, although her paintings should not be mistaken for illustrations of particular scientific theories.
Rather, science offered her a language through which to imagine connections between phenomena that conventional perception treated as separate.
In Harmony (Armonía, 1956), a figure attempts to arrange objects upon an extraordinary three-dimensional musical staff. Shells, geometric forms and organic materials become elements in a mysterious system of musical composition.
The room itself appears animated. Figures emerge from its walls, while the relationship between architecture, objects and living organisms becomes increasingly uncertain.
The central protagonist is searching for an underlying order capable of connecting seemingly unrelated elements of existence.
The painting draws upon an ancient intellectual tradition, particularly the Pythagorean understanding of music as an expression of mathematical harmony.
For Varo, music provided a means of imagining relationships that could not easily be explained through ordinary physical description. Sound, geometry and consciousness belonged to the same interconnected universe.
Her alchemical imagery operated similarly.
Alchemy historically combined practical experimentation with philosophical and spiritual speculation. Its ambitions extended beyond the transformation of ordinary metals into gold, encompassing purification, regeneration and the search for hidden relationships within matter.
Varo adapted this tradition as a model for artistic creation. Her laboratories contain mechanical apparatus, mysterious substances and solitary experimenters whose activities appear directed towards transformation rather than conventional scientific discovery.
The alchemist and the artist become closely related figures, both attempting to reveal possibilities concealed within the material world.
The Architecture of the Mind
Architecture occupies a particularly important position in Varo’s paintings.
Her invented environments contain Gothic arches, narrow towers, labyrinthine corridors, staircases and elaborate chambers. They recall monasteries, castles and Renaissance workshops, but their proportions and spatial relationships frequently defy physical possibility.
These settings are seldom merely decorative.
A tower may function as a place of confinement or as an instrument of observation. A corridor can suggest an intellectual journey, while a workshop becomes a space in which reality is actively reconstructed.
Varo’s most elaborate exploration of these ideas appears in her celebrated triptych, consisting of Toward the Tower (1960), Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961) and The Escape (1961).
The three paintings describe the journey of a young woman from institutional confinement towards freedom.
In the first panel, identically dressed girls leave a convent-like building under the supervision of authoritative figures. Their expressions suggest a condition of unquestioning obedience, although one girl appears distinctly aware of the world beyond her immediate circumstances.
The second panel takes place inside an extraordinary tower, where young women sit at looms producing an immense embroidered fabric.
The material flows out through the windows, becoming the mountains, seas and landscapes of the world below.
What appears to be a traditionally feminine domestic activity has acquired cosmic significance. The women are literally manufacturing the material universe.
The third painting depicts the protagonist escaping with a companion in a fantastical vessel, leaving the restrictions of the tower behind.
The sequence invites interpretation as an allegory of Varo’s own rejection of religious authority and her eventual intellectual independence.
But its broader significance lies in the relationship between creation and control.
In Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, the women possess extraordinary creative power while remaining subject to an institutional system that determines how that power is exercised.
Varo transforms embroidery, historically associated with feminine obedience and domestic accomplishment, into an act of world-making.
The work proposes an unsettling question: what happens when those capable of constructing reality are denied authority over their own lives?
Painting as Material Experiment
The apparent perfection of Varo’s painted surfaces conceals a highly experimental working process.
She frequently worked on hardboard panels, developing luminous images through carefully controlled layers of paint. But she also adopted Surrealist techniques that introduced chance into the construction of an image.
These included decalcomania, in which wet paint is transferred between surfaces to produce unexpected patterns; grattage, involving the scraping of painted layers; and soufflage, in which air is blown across wet paint to create unpredictable marks.
In Encounter (1959), a woman discovers a second version of her own face inside a small box. The rippling surface of her blue garment was produced using soufflage, creating the impression of fabric merging with water.
Varo integrated such accidental effects into compositions of extraordinary precision.
There is a significant difference between her practice and the pure automatism advocated by some early Surrealists. Rather than allowing unconscious impulses to dictate the entire image, she combined chance with prolonged reflection and meticulous execution.
Recent technical investigations, particularly those published in Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, edited by Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq, have revealed the complexity of her material procedures.
Her work was neither spontaneous fantasy nor simply painstaking illustration. It emerged from an interaction between experimentation and control, with the physical properties of materials contributing to the development of the imagined world.
The Woman as Creator
The recurring protagonists of Varo’s paintings frequently possess her distinctive physical features: elongated faces, prominent eyes and narrow noses.
Yet they should not automatically be understood as self-portraits.
They are often androgynous, hybrid or partially transformed, occupying identities that resist conventional distinctions between human, animal and machine.
In The Call (La llamada, 1961), a luminous figure moves through an architectural courtyard, carrying alchemical instruments. Her hair rises towards a celestial source of energy, while surrounding figures remain embedded within the walls.
The contrast between the moving protagonist and the immobile figures suggests an awakening of individual consciousness.
She does not require rescue or instruction. Her authority emerges from knowledge acquired through her own investigation.
This is one of the most important distinctions between Varo’s mature work and the conventional imagery of Surrealism.
The female figure is not a passive embodiment of the irrational. She becomes an active participant in the discovery and transformation of reality.
This does not mean that every painting should be reduced to a feminist allegory. Varo’s interests were considerably broader, and many of her protagonists appear deliberately detached from fixed gender categories.
Nevertheless, her work repeatedly challenges the assumptions that historically associated intellectual authority, scientific experimentation and artistic creation primarily with men.
A World That Refuses to Remain Still
Varo’s final painting, Still Life Reviving (Naturaleza muerta resucitando, 1963), provides an extraordinary culmination of these investigations.
Inside a Gothic chamber, a tablecloth begins to rotate around a central candle. Fruit rises into the air, moving in planetary orbits before colliding and releasing seeds that germinate upon the floor.
The traditional still life, historically associated with mortality and the transience of earthly possessions, has become an image of inexhaustible movement and regeneration.
The painting brings together several of Varo’s most persistent preoccupations: cosmic order, the animation of matter, the transformation of domestic objects and the relationship between destruction and creation.
It also demonstrates her capacity to give familiar objects an entirely different ontological status. Fruit, fabric, architecture and light participate in a universe in which the distinction between living and non-living matter is no longer stable.
The work was completed shortly before her death from a heart attack in Mexico City in October 1963. She was fifty-four.
Her death interrupted a period of remarkable artistic achievement. Following her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1956, she had become a celebrated figure, attracting devoted audiences and collectors.
The final decade of her life produced the paintings upon which much of her international reputation now rests.
Beyond Surrealism
Varo’s place within twentieth-century art has undergone a substantial reassessment.
Long recognised as an important figure in Mexican cultural life, she was for many years less familiar to European audiences than male artists associated with the Surrealist movement.
Her work has sometimes been described through the language of fantasy, magic and eccentricity, descriptions that acknowledge its unusual imagery while overlooking the intellectual ambition of its construction.
Recent scholarship has placed greater emphasis upon her technical processes, extensive reading and sophisticated engagement with the histories of science and philosophy.
The Art Institute of Chicago’s Science Fictions exhibition of 2023 was particularly important in demonstrating that Varo’s interest in metaphysical speculation was inseparable from her disciplined approach to painting.
Her work also belongs within a longer history of artists who investigated the relationship between observation and imagination, from Renaissance experiments in perspective to the visionary architectures of modern art.
What distinguishes Varo is her conviction that these approaches need not be contradictory.
Scientific observation, spiritual speculation, material experiment and imaginative invention could all participate in the same pursuit of understanding.
Her paintings do not ask the viewer simply to abandon reason and enter a dream. They challenge the assumption that reason, as conventionally defined, can account for the entirety of experience.
Within their precisely constructed interiors, machines produce living creatures, music organises matter and embroidered fabrics become the surface of the earth.
Everything is extraordinary, yet nothing appears arbitrary.
Varo’s achievement was to make the impossible seem not merely conceivable but intellectually necessary. Her paintings propose that reality may be considerably more intricate than the systems through which we ordinarily attempt to understand it.
Read our review of Remedios Varo at Lousiana Museum of Modern Art
