The Invented Worlds of Remedios Varo and the Science of Imagination

Remedios Varo built paintings that feel like laboratories, observatories and dream chambers at once. Their inhabitants study invisible forces, travel through enchanted machinery and transform knowledge into a form of magic. In her art, imagination is not an escape from reality; it is a method for examining it.

Born in Spain and formed through the upheavals of twentieth-century Europe, Varo eventually made Mexico City her home. Her paintings draw on Surrealism, alchemy, folklore, astronomy, anatomy and architecture, yet they resist easy classification. Each work proposes a private universe with its own laws, instruments and emotional weather.

For Australian viewers, her art can feel especially rewarding in the quiet of a gallery afternoon, whether browsing the NGV in Melbourne, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney or an online collection after a long arvo. The Woman Gallery’s curated approach offers a useful setting for discovering how women artists have imagined the world across centuries, alongside contemporary art-inspired objects for the home.

A Life Shaped By Movement

Varo was born in Anglès, Catalonia, in 1908 and grew up in a household connected to travel, engineering and technical drawing. Her father’s work exposed her to maps, instruments and precise forms, while her artistic education at Madrid’s Academia de San Fernando introduced her to academic painting. These experiences later resurfaced as towers, wheels, telescopes and strange devices.

She joined the Surrealist circle in Barcelona and moved through a Europe unsettled by fascism and war. After the Spanish Civil War, she lived in France, where she encountered artists including Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington. Internment and displacement marked this period, but Mexico eventually became the place where Varo developed her most distinctive visual language.

In Mexico City, she found a creative community that included Carrington, Kati Horna and other artists, writers and intellectuals. Her mature work emerged from this mixture of exile, friendship and intense study. The result was a body of paintings where personal memory could coexist with cosmology.

Machines For Invisible Forces

Varo’s machines rarely perform a practical task in the ordinary sense. A wheel may grind starlight, a pulley may draw music from the air, or a vessel may connect a solitary figure with the wider universe. These contraptions suggest that existence is governed by hidden systems that science has only partly described.

Her interest in science was imaginative rather than documentary. She borrowed the look of laboratory glassware, anatomical diagrams and astronomical instruments, then placed them in impossible combinations. The familiar authority of scientific equipment gives her fantasies a persuasive structure. We believe in the machine because its parts appear to obey a careful design.

This is where her invented worlds become intellectually compelling. Varo does not present rational thought and mystery as enemies. She imagines a science of intuition, where observation includes dreams, memory, sensation and spiritual longing. Knowledge becomes something embodied, fragile and quietly transformative.

Alchemy, Matter And Transformation

Alchemy provides one of Varo’s richest symbolic sources. Its old experiments with metals, fire, purification and transmutation allow her to picture change as both physical and psychological. Her figures are often engaged in processes that seem to alter matter, but the deeper subject is the transformation of identity.

In paintings such as Creation of the Birds, the artist figure uses a complex apparatus to produce living forms from colour, music and energy. The scene resembles a workshop, yet it also evokes birth, artistic labour and cosmic creation. Varo makes creativity look disciplined without making it mechanical.

Her alchemical imagery also speaks to the pressures placed on women’s lives. A woman may appear enclosed within a tower or burdened by a rigid costume, but she is rarely passive. She is brewing, observing, travelling or assembling the device that may change her circumstances. The studio becomes a site of self-invention.

Women Who Build Their Own Cosmos

Varo’s protagonists are often solitary women with elongated faces, flowing hair and an alert, inward gaze. They are not conventional heroines posing for admiration. Instead, they work. They read maps, conduct experiments, steer vessels and move through corridors designed according to their own purposes.

This emphasis on female agency distinguishes Varo’s imagery from many traditions in which women appear as muses, allegories or objects of desire. Her figures possess expertise, even when the nature of that expertise remains mysterious. Their knowledge is expressed through concentration and action rather than public authority.

The paintings also make room for ambiguity. A woman may be a scientist, sorcerer, traveller, musician and dreamer at the same time. Varo’s visual language suggests that identity need not be reduced to one role. This layered representation remains meaningful within conversations about women artists and the historical barriers that shaped who was allowed to be seen as an intellectual creator.

Architecture For The Inner Life

Varo’s settings are as important as her characters. Narrow rooms, spiral staircases, forest laboratories and suspended bridges create a psychology in architectural form. The buildings appear old and futuristic together, as though medieval masonry had been redesigned by an astronomer.

Many of these spaces are neither welcoming nor threatening. They are testing grounds. A corridor may lead to revelation, while a window may open onto a landscape that exists only in the mind. Perspective becomes unstable, encouraging viewers to consider whether the scene is a memory, a dream or a parallel reality.

For audiences used to the vast distances of the Australian landscape, Varo’s enclosed worlds offer a striking contrast. Her cosmos is often reached through a cramped room, a concealed door or a fragile machine rather than an open horizon. The intimacy of these spaces makes imagination feel practical: something built, maintained and inhabited.

Reading The Silence Between Symbols

Varo’s paintings reward slow looking because their meaning is rarely delivered in a single symbol. A cat, thread, moon, vessel or musical instrument can suggest several possibilities at once. The best response is not to decode every object into a fixed answer, but to notice how each element contributes to the work’s atmosphere and movement.

Her palette supports this process. Ochres, smoky greens, deep browns and muted blues create a world that feels aged, mineral and nocturnal. Small areas of light draw attention towards hands, faces or instruments, making discovery feel gradual. The paintings resemble pages from an unknown field manual.

This patient mode of viewing suits the way many Australians now encounter art: across major institutions, independent galleries and digital collections that allow a work to be revisited. An online platform such as The Woman Gallery can place Varo within a wider history of women artists, helping viewers follow connections between Surrealism, self-portraiture, science fiction and contemporary practice.

Carrying Imagination Into Daily Life

Varo’s art can change how ordinary objects are understood. A lamp becomes a moon engine, a sewing thread becomes a line of fate, and a staircase becomes a diagram of thought. This does not make daily life less real; it reveals the strange systems already operating within it.

Her work also has an affinity with music and movement. The repeated wheels, spirals and pathways in her compositions suggest rhythm, while her figures seem to move through an unseen score. For readers interested in the relationship between visual art, dance and ritual, a resource such as this tango festival guide offers a different way to think about embodied pattern, performance and cultural memory.

Ways to bring Varo’s imaginative method into an art-viewing practice:

• Spend several minutes with one painting before reading its title or description.
• Look for the practical action taking place: mixing, measuring, steering, weaving or observing.
• Trace every line that connects a figure to a machine, animal or landscape.
• Notice how a room’s architecture shapes the character’s sense of freedom.
• Compare the work’s scientific details with its emotional atmosphere.
• Keep a sketchbook of invented tools, maps and private symbols inspired by what you see.
• Revisit the painting later and record which meanings have changed.

Varo’s science of imagination ultimately asks us to treat curiosity as a creative force. Her worlds are strange because they take inner experience seriously, giving dreams the instruments, laboratories and architecture they require. They also remind us that knowledge can be tender, intuitive and deeply personal.

Explore Remedios Varo alongside other women artists through The Woman Gallery’s curated collections, and let her mechanical birds, hidden observatories and travelling figures open a more inventive way of looking. Art becomes richer when it is allowed to remain mysterious while still inviting close attention.