Solar Music
REMEDIOS VARO
REMEDIOS VARO, 1955. OIL ON CANVAS.
Remedios Varo spend most of the 1930s on the run. First from her native Spain where her outspoken political activism and relationship with a known anarchist artist made her a target for Franco in the rising Spanish Civil War. And then from Nazism in her adopted Paris for much the same reasons. A decade was spent moving from town to town in Western Europe, living a bohemian life of coffee shops, art and destitution with the avant-garde intellectuals of the day. While she was painting throughout, and well regarded for her surrealist works of esoteric magic, it was not until 1941 when she settled in Mexico City that she reached artistic maturity. The work made there is complex and beautiful, as much inspired by the folk practices of Mexico as the European Surrealists and intellectuals she had spent the previous decade with. There are nods to occult magic, and heady psychoanalytical dives into the subconscious which combine to make her work somewhat unclassifiable. It was while in Mexico that she became friends with Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna and, together, they became known as ‘The Three Witches of Surrealism’. Yet the name has always been unjust, as together they elevated surrealist ideas into something more tender and complex, removing the masculine edge parts of the movement had to create a style that feels, even today, singular.