Remedios Varo - Surreal Friends

Armonia

I couldn't miss out Remedios Varo, the third and final artist in the Pallant House Gallery's Surreal Friends Exhibition. I think that technically Varo was a better painter than Carrington. There is a great deal of attention to detail in her work, for example the parquet floor in Armonia, which must have been a painstaking task. Especially as it isn't the smallest of her works. In other's she layered the paint to make trees look three dimensional and yet others, used the most delicate strokes, that look as though they had been painted with a needle. It's probably because I'm not a painter that I find these elements in her work so fascinating. As to the content, although just as surreal as Carrington's, I felt that her inspiration came more from fairy tales than Biblical hell and hades. There is something very attractive, almost Heath Robinson, about the little contraptions in her work.

Varo like her two contemporaries appears to have had her share of romance being married three times in total and living a Bohemian lifestyle. It's her earlier life that was of more interest to me though. Apparently a great deal of her inspiration came from the blueprints and technical drawings of her father a hydraulic engineer. You can definitely see this in her work.