Remedios Varo: Encuentros
May 11—July 15, 2023
436 Jackson Street, San Francisco, CA
San Francisco, CA: Gallery Wendi Norris presents Remedios Varo: Encuentros, the Spanish artist’s second solo gallery exhibition since her death in 1963. With approximately twelve works on display, Remedios Varo: Encuentros explores Varo’s engagement with the unexpected. A decade after organizing the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition (Indelible Fables, 2012), Gallery Wendi Norris is thrilled to deepen its commitment to the work of Remedios Varo, a vitally important modernist and pioneer of a feminist Surrealism.
“This exhibition presents a rare and extraordinary opportunity to view powerful and awe-inspiring works by Remedios Varo, an imaginative artist whose mastery puts her in the ranks of the greatest painters of the 20th century,” states Wendi Norris, Varo’s gallerist and market expert.
The exhibition takes its name from one of Varo’s signature paintings, Encuentro (1959). In this composition, a woman in a watery blue dress sits at a table and opens a box from which her own face stares back at her. Varo’s visual imagination is replete with such uncanny encounters: chance meetings between two beings, confrontations with the self, entanglements with the cosmos, brushes with the unknown. In each piece in the exhibition, the natural laws of the universe are suspended.
Remedios Varo: Encuentros features paintings from throughout the artist’s career, including her last painting Naturaleza muerta resucitando (1963). In this wry take on the still life tradition, the objects are anything but still. Varo creates a dynamic vegetal solar system in which levitated fruits orbit a lighted candle, leaving trails of cosmic dust in their wake. Also on view is the haunting Ruptura (1955), a painting with the air of mystery for which Varo is famous. Rarely exhibited works on paper, like La torre (1947) and Apártalos que voy de paso (1959), offer viewers opportunities to experience other facets of the artist’s technical mastery and fantastical vision.
Remedios Varo is achieving widespread institutional recognition. The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Toledo Museum of Art have all recently acquired Varo artworks from Gallery Wendi Norris. Her work was featured in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, as well as in the recent exhibitions Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice) and the Museum Barberini (Potsdam), and Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and Tate Modern (London). It is currently on view in Third Eye: The Costantini Collection in Malba at Fundación Malba (Buenos Aires). Varo will be the subject of the forthcoming exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, from July 29 to November 27, 2023, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. in 23 years.