Remedios Varo Uranga (1908 - 1963, Spain/Mexico): Works. Part I Remedios Varo Uranga was a Spanish-Mexican para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga in Anglès, a small town in the province of Girona (Spain). Her birth helped her mother get over the death of another daughter, which is the reason behind the name. Varo’s father, Rodrigo Varo y Zajalvo, was an intellectual man who had a strong influence on his daughter’s artistic development. Varo would copy the blueprints he brought home from his job in construction and he helped her further develop her technical drawing abilities. He encouraged independent thought and supplemented her education with science and adventure books, notable the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe. As she grew older he provided her with text on mysticism and philosophy. Varo’s mother, Ignacia Uranga Bergareche, was born to Basque parents in Argentina. She was a devout Catholic and commended herself to the patron saint of Anglès, the Virgin of Los Remedios, promising to name her first daughter after the saint. Her father was a hydraulic engineer and the family traveled the Iberian Peninsula and into North Africa. To keep Remedios busy during these long trips, her father had her copy the technical drawings of his work with their straight lines, radii and perspectives, which she reproduced faithfully. As a child she read much with favorite authors including Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and Alexandre Dumas. She also read books about oriental philosophy & mysticism. Those first few years of her life left an impression on her that would later show up in motifs like machinery, furnishing, artifacts, and Romanesque & Gothic architecture unique to Anglès. Varo was given the basic education deemed proper for young ladies of a good upbringing at a convent school - an experience that fostered her rebellious tendencies. Varo took a critical view of religion and rejected the religious ideology of her childhood education and instead clung to the liberal and universalist ideas that her father instilled in her. In 1924 she studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement. She met her second husband (after her death it was discovered that she had never divorced her first husband, painter Gerardo Lizarraga), the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, in Barcelona. There she was a member of the art group Logicophobiste. Due to her Republican ties, her 1937 move to Paris with Péret ensured that she would never be able to return to Francos Spain. She was forced into exile from Paris during the German occupation of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941. She died at the height of her career from a heart attack in Mexico City.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 11:14:16 +0000