Remedios Varo valuation
Spanish Surrealist who painted, in Mexico and with a miniaturist's brush, women alchemists and travellers in impossible machines.
Remedios Varo was born at Anglès in Catalonia in 1908, the daughter of a hydraulic engineer from whom she learned technical drawing, and was one of the first women to study at the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid.
What a work by Remedios Varo is worth
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Bio
Remedios Varo was born at Anglès in Catalonia in 1908, the daughter of a hydraulic engineer from whom she learned technical drawing, and was one of the first women to study at the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. In Barcelona in the 1930s she joined the Surrealist group Logicofobista, and in 1937 she went to Paris with the poet Benjamin Péret, entering the Surrealist circle; in 1941 the two fled occupied France for Mexico. There, after years of commercial work, she developed from the early 1950s the meticulous paintings she is known for: heart-shaped faces, alchemical laboratories, cloaked travellers and fairy-tale machines. She was a close friend of Leonora Carrington, and died in Mexico City in 1963.
Her mature output, made in little more than a decade, is small, and much of it is in Mexico, where her work has been declared a national artistic monument, which restricts its permanent export. Paintings outside Mexico are rare and usually well documented. The catalogue raisonné compiled by Ricardo Ovalle with Walter Gruen, her last partner, is the reference. Drawings and studies exist in modest numbers, and forgeries have appeared.
Madrid, Paris and Mexico City
In Mexico Varo worked for years on commercial jobs, including advertising for the pharmaceutical company Bayer, and in 1947 spent time in Venezuela with a French scientific expedition. Her first solo exhibition was at the Galería Diana in Mexico City in 1956.
The Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City gave her a retrospective in 1971, and her standing has grown steadily with exhibitions in Mexico, Spain and the United States since.
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