Presents 77 of the finest paintings by one of Mexico's foremost modern artists and a leading practitioner of surrealism.

Surreal Friends brings together for the first time the work of three women Surrealist artists, brought together in exile in Mexico in the 1940s: British painter Leonora Carrington, Spanish painter Remedios Varo and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. For all three women, Mexico offered freedom to explore their art in ways that had not been possible in Europe. Surreal Friends tells the fascinating story of their artistic friendship.

While the reputation of Remedios Varo (1908-63) the surrealist painter is now well established, Remedios Varo the writer has yet to be fully discovered. Her writings, which were never published during her life let alone translated into English, present something of a missing chapter and offer the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief and an ongoing meditation on the need for (and the trauma of) escape in all its forms. This volume brings together the painter's collected writings and includes an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances (as well as to people unknown), dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, exercises in surrealist automatic writing and prose poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific, De Homo Rodans, an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Ostensibly written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, Varo's text utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways Myths are merely corrupted Myrtles.

"The adventures that fill the strange and wonderful paintings by Remedios Varo (1908-1963) reflect the physical and psychological journeys of her own tumultuous life. Raised in a strict Spanish family and rigorously trained in academic art, Varo first found escape in Barcelona's bohemian avant-garde. After fleeing the Spanish Civil War with the poet Benjamin Péret, later her husband, she entered the inner circle of the Surrealists in Paris. Forced to flee again by the Nazis, she and Péret faced a year of mounting danger in Marseilles before securing passage to Mexico. Finding welcome refuge in Mexico City, where she remained until her death, Varo produced the extraordinary paintings for which she gained renown. Janet A. Kaplan's vivid chronicle, the first on the subject in English, weaves Varo's life with the artist's exquisite work. Painted with a jewellike palette and old-master precision, Varo's intimate tableaus, rich with details of women's experience, tell fantasy tales of alchem, science, mysticism, and magic. Fifty color reproductions capture the wit and beauty of her major paintings; numerous black-and-white illustrations document other works and portray the compelling artist with her circle of lifelong friends and admirers. The book is further enlivened by her own voice, conveyed in hilarious letters and surreal stories, published here for the first time. An instant celebrity in Mexico--where her retrospectives have drawn record crowds--Varo has recently found enthusiastic audiences in Europe and the Americas. A woman of intense magnetism and powerful imagination, Varo has been little known outside Mexico. The fascinating story of her life and dazzling intricacy of her art will prove a revelation."--Front flap of book jacket.

This book deals with the life and works of one of the most interesting and mysterious surrealist painters of the twentieth century. The first monograph on the artist to circulate worldwide, it includes an introductory study by Masayo Nonaka, curator of the exhibition Women Surrealists in Mexico and author of several books on Mexican surrealism. Masayo's essay provide a singular perspective on the pictorial universe of Remedios Varo and is accompanied by magnificent reproductions of her most important paintings.The group of works included in this book was part of the exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, which visited various venues in the Unites States and Canada in 2012.

A woman writer moves into a house she inherited from a poet in the hills of Arizona. The man died in mysterious circumstances and Maggie Black wants to find out why. So begins a terrifying introduction to the Indian spirits which roam the hills and feed on people's creative juices.

A detailed and scholarly collection of essays on the art of Varo (b. Spain 1908 - d. México 1963) as studied from 5 different perspectives, with contributions from Walter Gruen, her second husband.