The young Remedios Varo was a Spanish girl with a vivid and expressive imagination. Her early adulthood coincided with the horrors and chaos of the Spanish Civil War and World War II but her free spirit and willingness to travel kept her just beyond the reach of the wave of terror.

Born in 1908, she spent her early childhood living in towns scattered across Spain and North Africa, as her father, a hydraulic engineer, moved from city to city with her and his family in tow. His technical drawing was one of her first creative influences, as she drew inspiration from copying the shapes and geometry of blueprints and structural design.

By the age of 8, her family had settled in Madrid and as a teenager she attended Madrid's Academia de San Fernando to study painting. Remedios was passionate about the avant garde artists and their respective styles that were revolutionizing the world of art in her time.

As the Civil War swept Spain in the mid-1930's, she travelled to Paris where she met Max Ernst, André Breton, Joan Miró and a young, English surrealist named Leonora Carrington with whom she would share a lifelong friendship. During this time her work was exhibited in galleries in Paris and Tokyo and published in several Surrealist journals.

In 1940, the conquering armies of Adolf Hitler reached Paris, and Remedios fled with many others of the Parisian art circle to the city of Marseille, awaiting permission to leave the country. During this time, Remedios' new friend Leonora had escaped to Spain where she spent many months enduring an onset of mental illness and ill-advised drug therapy.

By the following year, Remedios had reached Mexico City where many artists in exile had found a welcome refuge. During the war years, she lent her talents to create art and images for anti-fascist propaganda, earning a living as a costume designer and commercial artist.

The post-war years were her most successful, as she matured as an artist and followed her passion for philosophy, mysticism and the occult. She studied with equal interest the writings of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, the Theosophist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the spiritual teacher Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, as well as ancient eastern philosophies.

Varo was married twice and had many mutually supportive relationships with male artists and adventurers, but she was also devout in her dedication to her female friends and helped to organize many group exhibits of the works of women artists. Her last and happiest relationship was with an Austrian busi-nessman named Walter Gruen who encouraged her career as an artist during her most prolific and inspired years, from 1953 onward.

Remedios' paintings were most often done on masonite board and rendered in oils, but her technique more closely resembled that most commonly used with gouache or tempera colors, with many small, interwoven brush strokes. Her influences can be seen in the works of Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Braque, El Greco, and Francisco Goya. Her work is associated with the artistic concept of Irrealism, which encompasses the schools of surrealism, dadaism, impressionism, etc

Remedios Varo suffered a heart attack in 1963 at a time when she was achieving her greatest success. Her life mate, Walter Gruen, was notified of her collapse while at work and rushed to her side, but the artist died in his arms at the age of 54.

She left behind a personal collection of 39 painitngs that have been valued at 15 million dollars. As of the year 2005, the rights of ownership to the collection were being fought over in Mexican courts between a 91 year old Gruen, a Spanish niece of the artist whom she barely knew, and Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art. Gruen's claim to be the rightful heir to Ms Varo was denied on the grounds that she had never legally divorced her second husband, the French poet Benjamin Peret.