When Remedios was a child, she traveled at length through the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, accompanying her engineer father, whose career forced the family to be constantly on the move. She displayed her gifts in drawing and mathematics at an early age, and studied painting at the Academy San Fernando in Madrid, tending toward works of pure imagination. Her meeting in 1936 with the poet Benjamin Péret, who had come to fight in the Spanish Civil War, was decisive. She became his companion and followed him to Paris, where he introduced her to the surrealist group. In 1942 they fled occupied France to live in Mexico City, then divorced in 1948, and Péret returned to France alone. Remedios then developed her own style, and her first exhibition in Mexico City, in 1954, drew considerable crowds, with Mexican collectors vying for her paintings. She painted a strange, almost medieval world, with ghostlike figures astride astonishing flying or aquatic machines, haunted houses with living furniture and objects flitting about, lakeside cities, animals of unknown species and women with wind-blown, sail-like garments. Her artistic creations are occasionally reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch. Remedios showed at the first Mexican Biennial and was awarded Grand Prize at the first Salon of Women's Art. Her last exhibition, in June 1962 at the Galeria Juan Martin, was the most important of all. The retrospective of her work at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1964 drew over fifty thousand visitors. The Museo de Arte Moderno of Mexico City holds a large number of her paintings.
Remedios Varo
Born 1913 in Angles, Spain; died 1963 in Mexico City.