Unexpected Visit

Remedios Varo Uranga was a Spanish-Mexican Para-Surrealist painter and anarchist. The male Surrealists almost never saw their female counterparts as capable artists. Female Surrealists were therefore forced to find ways of working within the restrictions of this misconceived definition, while still trying to refute it. Varo does this through her images of women in confined spaces. Later in her career Varo’s characters developed into emblematic, androgynous figures with heart-shaped faces, large almond eyes, and aquiline noses, which represented her own features. Varo often depicted herself through these key features in her paintings, regardless of the figure's gender. A sense of isolation was achieved again and again as Varo secluded her characters in one environment or another, conveying an extraordinarily powerful message to those who paid attention long enough to notice it. Her use of seemingly autobiographical characters—confined and held captive by forces unknown—could be seen as exposing the dynamic of superiority that is inherent in male Surrealist’s misuse of women as muses. It could be interpreted that her paintings are responses to the marginalization of women; by likening her characters and chimerical figures to prisoners she portrays the misogynist treatment of women artists characteristic of their male counterpart.