A new exhibition dedicated to the drawings of Remedios Varo (1908-1963) demonstrates the growing interest in the painter’s production. In addition to being the first dedicated exclusively to her drawn work, with A visionary line: Drawings by Remedios Varo The artist returns to exhibit in New York after almost 40 years, in a space outside the Wendi Norris gallery, whose headquarters are in San Francisco. This is a little-known collection belonging to Varo’s doctor and friend.
The artist is famous for her enigmatic works that combine scientific technical precision with an esoteric and feminist theme. She created around 400 pieces, of which more than half are drawings. The Wendi Norris gallery has had works by Varo since 2004 and has been the only one to organize individual exhibitions of the artist, including these Indelible fables (2012) y Remedios Varo: Encounters (2023).
The nine pieces reflect the Renaissance-inspired techniques employed by Varo, as well as showcasing his technical precision. As indexes or reports of the painter’s fantastic ideas and preliminary drafts of her paintings, her sketches in themselves are already works of art. Included in the exhibition are studies for larger paintings, such as The flute-playerfrom the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, and Ladies tailorfrom the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Last year Varo’s work was the subject of a pioneering exhibition: Remedios Varo: Science fictions, mounted at the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, his work is included in the traveling exhibition IMAGINE! 100 years of international surrealismwhich recently opened at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, conceived in collaboration with the Center Pompidou in Paris.
Each venue receives the body of the traveling exhibition, which is enriched by emphasizing its own heritage. In Brussels, the venue will explore surrealism from a symbolist perspective, through more than 130 works of art (paintings, works on paper, sculptures, objects, assemblages and photographs). Since 1880 Brussels was an exceptional focus for the arts in general and the avant-garde in particular. Symbolism evolved rapidly and largely anticipated the rise of the surrealist movement. Several decades later, Brussels became a center for Belgian surrealism.
IMAGINE! It will then travel to the Pompidou Center, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid to conclude its tour at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
After graduating from the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Remedios Varo moved to Barcelona in the mid-1930s, where she joined the avant-garde surrealist group Logicophobista. After the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in 1936, he fled to Paris with the surrealist poet Benjamín Péret. There, Varo became involved with the surrealists of the City of Light and his work was exhibited in the exhibition Fantasy art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1936). Likewise, he participated in multiple early surrealist exhibitions in various parts of the world, including the International Surrealism Exhibition in Mexico City, in 1940.
A visionary line: Drawings by Remedios Varo It will open on May 8 at the Wendi Norris gallery in New York, in association with the Adler Beatty company.