Remedio Varo is much better known in Mexico than in the US, but she produced hundreds of paintings that evoke the subconsciousness. Her contributions to the Surrealist movement added not only lovely, dreamlike art, but also a perspective that imagined women as central figures with their own designs — definitely a break from the images of females depicted by her male colleagues.
The painting featured here, “Mujer Saljendo del Psicoanalista”/”Woman Leaving the Psychoanalist” (1961), exemplifies many aspects of Varo’s works. Here, you see a woman dressed in a green flowy veil, stepping along a stone walkway outside a Medieval-looking building. Her veil has slipped down from her face, and parallel pairs of eyes look out from both the face of the woman and her veil.
Art critic Jennifer Mundy puts it best when she notes that the main action in the painting is the woman dropping a “male disembodied head” down a well “without a trace of hesitation or compunction.” We don’t know how autobiographical Varo intended this painting to be, but the woman discarding negative male influences might stand in for many people’s stories.
Varo’s works drew from several inspirations – many of her settings and painterly style come from Medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch. Also, Goya’s bird/human hybrid creatures also appear in Varo’s subjects. Unlike these artists, Varo’s Surrealist paintings didn’t focus on violence or horror. Varo herself was no stranger to the hideous aspects of human nature – she had to flee her native country of Spain and her adopted country of France with the fascist wars of the mid-20th century. But her themes focused on other subjects: creativity, isolation, Eastern philosophies, and the emerging science of relativity and quantum physics, to name a few.
Varo lived an adventurous life, taking several male lovers, among whom were some of the most accomplished Surrealist painters of her time. She also formed strong friendships with two women artists that inculcated in her an interest in folklore, magic, and theories about consciousness — the trio of women were even dubbed “the three witches” because of these influences. Varo died in 1963.
Source(s): Jennifer Mundy, _Surrealism: Desire Unbound_ (Lindon: Tate Publishing, 2001), p 306. Janet Ann Kaplan_Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys_, cited by www.maramarietta.com. _Medium_, “The essence of seeing: Surrealism, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics” by Jessica Rees, March 9, 2020. Painting one “Mujer Saljendo del Psicoanalista” 1961. Painting two “Creation of the Birds” 1957. This deals with themes of creativity, showing the mythical animal influences described above. Painting three “Phenomenon of Weightlessness” 1963, and shows Varo’s exploration of how Einstein’s theories of Relativity challenge ideas about space and time. Painting four “Fenómeno” 1962 shows an influence of Quantum Physics with wave-particle duality and superposition challenging ideas about objective reality.
