Another in an occasional series about women artists and here we have . . . .

REMEDIOS VARO

Remedios Varo Uranga was one of the few acknowledged female surrealist painters of the first half of the 20th century. She defied the male dominated artistic world of that era through her unique and peculiar approach to Surrealism. The stepping stones for her original form of Surrealism were set early in her childhood and adolescence, fuelled by a multicultural background and upbringing. Also, the great influence was her father, who instilled some core values in her, such as her ardent perfectionism, and the freedom of thought, which later took shape in her artwork.
Varo’s father, an engineer by profession, nurtured his daughter’s artistic potential by mentoring her in developing technical drawing skills. He also opened the doorway to her vivid imagination by presenting her with fantasy and adventure books. Being influenced in a technical and philosophical manner by her father, and spiritually by her deeply religious mother, Varo was torn between the two worlds. Therefore, she found herself drifting toward Surrealism and adopting it as the style, in which she would express the struggles of her inner world.
In her paintings, Varo found a safe place to revolt against Catholic practices from her maternal side, which the artist found quite restricting. She combined mystical beings and utopic machines together to give birth to her unique and enchanting style. The artist adopted mysticism and the occult as her main theme, and dismissed Christian and religious symbolism 

(trending leitmotifs of surrealist artists of the time, such as Salvador Dali in his later work, Max Ernst’s Crucifixion or Victor Brauner’s Adam & Eve)

 

Varo in her sudio

Through her art, Varo expressed her feminist beliefs and her need to oppose the superiority of male artists of that era. In the 1920s and 1930s, female painters were not fully recognized as true artists by the male counterparts and therefore, Varo and her fellow female surrealists struggled to win a place in the spotlight on a scene dominated by men. Throughout her career, viewers can find the recurring motif of the confined woman - an imprisonment of the female characters in dark or isolated spaces, hidden from the outside world. Another symbol that appears constantly is the crescent moon - an element that symbolizes the feminine aspect, and also the shadowy and introverted nature of the painter, who tried to make the viewer feel what it was like to be a female artist in the early 20th century.
Varo’s signature techniques were a juxtaposition of elements, a fumage (common technique of surrealist artists, such as Wolfgang Paalen and Salvador Dali, that allows the painter to charge the canvas with a mystical atmosphere), a utopic composition, and use of well-balanced colors and contrasts. To mark her presence on a canvas, Varo built androgynous looking characters with facial features that resembled her own. By juxtaposing nature versus machine, and feelings versus logic, the artist built a multidimensional world where she could fully express the multiple aspects of herself, interweaving the woman artist, the mystic, scientist, and spiritual being all into one.

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