This exhibition presents about 60 drawings, paintings, objects, and sketchbooks from her final eight years in Mexico, from 1955 to 1963. She died there of a heart attack in 1963 at age 54. She then emigrated to Mexico City in 1941 to avoid World War II, quickly befriending painter Leonora Carrington and photographer Kati Horna. Remedios Varo fled her homeland of Spain during the Spanish Civil War, landing in Paris in 1937, where she entered the Surrealist circle of Max Ernst. The paintings beckon us to plunge into their vaporous worlds while challenging us to decode intricate scenarios. A few of her subjects’ faces, inlayed with mother-of-pearl, catch the light like flecks of the moon. (Needless to say that Varo is just one of many women artists who were historically excluded from the history of Surrealism and art history in general.) Upon entering the show, the consistent orange and golden hues of her paintings set the room aglow. Science Fictions, at the Art Institute of Chicago, is the first major presentation of Varo’s work in the United States since 2000, when the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC organized a survey. Her working methods seem as much potion as process. Varo uniquely fuses technique with content, applying Surrealist methods of chance to delineate spaces and atmospheres infused with magic. Her work is so odd that it feels as if it occupies a category of its own, aligning with the Surrealist sensibilities of Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, or Leonora Carrington, but more otherworldly, more like pages of a medieval spell book or an ancient codex for girls. While all artists are conjurors, Remedios Varo (1908–1963) is a sorceress extraordinaire. CHICAGO - What would it be like to wake up, have coffee, and get to work cultivating the implausible, embracing not just the visible world but one of molecules, energies, metaphysics, and fourth dimensions.
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