Rating and value of paintings by Remedios Varo

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Remedios Varo artist rating and value        

The artist Remedios Varo leaves behind a rather colorful and surreal work, she is famous for her paintings and drawings. Now, prices for her works are rising under the auctioneers' gavel.

Her paintings are particularly prized, especially by American buyers. The price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €10 to €4,630,000, a substantial range but one that says a lot about the value that can be attributed to Remedios Varo's works.

In 2020, Armonia, a 1956 oil on masonite depicting a fantastic landscape was sold for €4,630,000, against an estimate of €1,780,000 to €2,670,000.

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

The style and technique of Remedios Varo  

Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963) was a major figure in 20th-century surrealism and esoteric art. She developed a highly personal surrealist style with a singular pictorial language, blending surrealism, mystical symbolism, esotericism and science fiction.

Her works are narrative, populated by androgynous characters, strange instruments and unreal architectures, in a rigorous dreamlike logic. She moves away from automatic or Freudian surrealism to build a structured, intellectual imagination, close to alchemical or Gnostic thought.

Her technique is influenced by the Flemish masters : she uses precise preparatory drawing, a layer of imprimatura, and superimposed glazes to create effects of transparency and light. Her brushstrokes are fine, detailed, almost miniaturistic, in the service of a world that is hyper-organized despite its strangeness.

She applies oil paint in subtle layers, with extreme attention to the rendering of materials (stone, wood, fabric and metal).

Highly influenced by engineering, mechanics, Gothic architecture and scientific tools, she populates her paintings with impossible machines, alchemical instruments, cogs and labyrinths. She uses forced or symbolic perspective, with narrow, vertical interiors that evoke asceticism or meditation.

These elements give her works a rigorous structure that contrasts with their visual strangeness. Her figures, often female or asexual, are depicted in rituals, experiments or transfigurations (readings, ascensions, magical operations and fusions with matter).

She often represents women as researchers, magicians, experimenters, inversting the codes of traditional surrealism. Her palette is often composed of soft, pearly tones (light ochre, verdigris, celadon blue, golden brown), punctuated by reds or golds. She masters an internal light, often unrealistic but coherent, that gives scenes a quality of vision or gentle hallucination.

This light serves to guide the eye through space and hierarchize symbolic forms. Her painting summons science, religion, magic, alchemy and Jungian psychology with a very high level of symbolization.

She conceives painting as a space for inner research, where every element carries meaning. Her style is a masterful blend of formal rationality and structured dreaming, which sets her apart from many other Surrealist artists.

The life of Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo was born in 1908 in Anglès, Catalonia. Her father, who was a hydraulic engineer, introduced her from childhood to technical drawing, mathematics and applied sciences, which were to become lasting influences in her work.

She trained at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrir (the same school as Dali), where she studied the Old Masters as well as classical techniques.

Varo participated in the Spanish artistic avant-garde from the 1930s, joining the Catalan surrealist group Logicofobista. She lived in Paris at the end of the 1930s and frequented the Surrealist circle around André Breton, but broke away because of her attraction to mysticism, science and feminine symbolism.

During the Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War, she fled facism and crossed several European countries. She took refuge in Mexico in 1941 after passing through Casablanca and Vichy France, accompanied by the poet Benjamin Péret.

Remedios Varo quickly became part of the Mexican intellectual scene, alongside Leonora Carrington, Kati Horna, Octavio Paz and Frida Kahlo. She worked in a variety of fields before making a living from her personal production (medical illustration, advertising, textile design).

Her work matured in Mexico, where she began to paint with intensity and continuity from the 1950s, in a rather studious solitude. Varos was inspired by Hermetic philosophy, alchemy, the natural sciences, Christian mysticism, the tarot and the writings of Jung.

Remedios Varo thus created an autonomous, deeply symbolic universe, reflecting her quest for meaning and her vision of art as a path to inner transformation. Although she was briefly married, the artist lived with great independence, often alone or in the company of other artists.

She had an intense artistic and friendly relationship with Leonora Carrington, with whom she shared similar spiritual and artistic visions. For a long time, she refused to sell her work, as she considered her painting above all an inner necessity and not a market product.

She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1963 in Mexico City, at the age of 54, leaving behind her a concentrated but very dense body of work, quickly recognized as a major in the history of Surrealism and 20th-century women's art.

Her influence is now being rediscovered in the fields of visionary art, esoteric feminism and contemporary alchemical iconography.

Focus on The Creation of Birds, Remedios Varo, 1957

The Creation of Birds is a 1957 work in oil on masonite, measuring 60 x 48 cm. It is held in a private Mexican collection and is regularly reproduced in major retrospectives.

It depicts a hybrid figure, half-human half-bird, painting live birds that escape from his pallet violin. The work features a solitary creator in a laboratory-studio, making birds with a brush, an alchemical inkwell and rays of light.

The artist is shown with owl wings, which are symbols of wisdom and night vision, and suggest an identification of Varo herself with the character. The birds come to life through light and music : the image becomes an allegory of artistic inspiration.

The laboratory evokes the cabinets of alchemists or hermetists : vials, containers, magnifying glasses, projected constellation... and the magic ink is linked to a celestial constellation via a lens, evoking the idea of cosmic knowledge or higher knowledge.

The scene condenses several disciplines (music, science, painting) into an act of total creation, where the artist is an initiate rather than a mere performer. The composition is symmetrical, almost architectural, with a slightly crushed perspective reminiscent of the Flemish masters.

The details are meticulous and the textures (feathers, curtains, scientific tools) are rendered with extreme precision. Successive glazes produce a diffuse, unearthly light, reinforcing the visionary character of the scene.

The palette is reduced but refined (sepia tones ; dark greens, pale gold, with touches of celestial blue). The light comes not from a natural source, but from the figure itself, as if inspiration were intended to illuminate the painting.

The work is intended to subvert the cliché of male genius, since here it is a woman, alone and concentrated, who masters the creative act. The image thus becomes a metaphor for the condition of the artist in exile, working in solitude but connected to cosmic and inner forces.

This painting is often read as an affirmation of the feminine power of transformation, far from all its passivity. This work is a mature masterpiece, synthesizing all the artist's preoccupations : creation, solitude, magic, knowledge and otherness.

It is among the most reproduced, analyzed and commented on, often considered an icon of esoteric surrealism, and embodies all Remedios Varo's originality.

His signature

Not all Remedios Varo's works are signed.

In any case, it remains essential to have your works appraised and authenticated. 

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