Breaking off - Remedios Varo
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Description
A surrealist painting by Remedios Varo featuring a cloaked figure descending stairs before a mysterious blue building.
Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born artist who spent much of her career in Mexico, created 'Breaking off' in 1955. The composition features a central figure descending a set of stone stairs, draped in a hooded cloak that obscures their form. Behind this figure stands a tall, blue, multi-storey building with arched windows, from which white fabric or paper forms appear to emerge and drift into the air. The scene is framed by two high, textured walls, creating a sense of enclosure or a narrow passage. The sky above is a warm, autumnal orange, contrasting with the cool tones of the architecture.
Varo often utilised precise, thin brushwork to construct her dreamlike narratives. Her technique draws from the tradition of the Old Masters, particularly in the way she renders light and shadow, yet the subject matter remains firmly within the realm of the subconscious. The figures in the windows, partially obscured, suggest a collective or perhaps a singular entity observed from different perspectives. The presence of small, snail-like forms on the stairs adds a layer of quiet, temporal observation to the scene.
This work reflects Varo's interest in alchemy, mysticism, and the psychological state of the individual. The act of 'breaking off' suggests a departure or a severance from a previous state of being. The architectural precision and the atmospheric quality of the light are characteristic of her mature period in Mexico City, where she developed a unique visual language that combined scientific curiosity with esoteric symbolism. The painting invites the viewer to consider the narrative implications of the figure's movement and the mysterious activity occurring within the building's windows, without providing a definitive explanation for the events depicted.
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Museum-grade giclée on FSC-certified archival matte paper, with framed and canvas options.
- Paper sizes: A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 and B2 (50×70 cm)
- Canvas: XS (20×30 cm) to Large (60×90 cm)
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Breaking off - Remedios Varo
Artist Biography
Remedios Varo
She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1930, one of the few women in her class. In Barcelona she fell in with the Surrealists and, through them, with the poet Benjamin Peret, who became her partner. When Paris fell, she was jailed on suspicion of espionage. After her release she and Peret boarded one of the last ships allowed to leave France, arriving in Mexico in 1941.
In Mexico City she became inseparable from the English Surrealist Leonora Carrington. Together with the photographer Kati Horna, the three were called the Three Witches. They attended meetings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky followers, studied alchemy and Jungian dream theory, and put ink in tapioca pearls to serve as caviar at dinner parties for Octavio Paz.
She did not paint prolifically until the last thirteen years of her life, once she was financially stable and free of wartime displacement. The paintings from this period are meticulous: tiny figures in architectural spaces that obey their own physics, conducting experiments with starlight or weaving the fabric of the universe from threads pulled out of the air.
Her posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City in 1971 drew more visitors than shows by Diego Rivera or David Alfaro Siqueiros. She had died of a heart attack in 1963, at fifty-four, at the peak of her working life.
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