[2] María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was born on 16 December 1908 in Anglès, a small town in the province of Girona, in Catalonia.

Her mother, Ignacia Uranga y Bergareche, was born in Argentina to Basque parents and her father, Rodrigo Varo y Zajalvo, was from Córdoba in Andalusia.

[3] When Varo was a young child, her family moved frequently throughout Spain and North Africa to follow her father's work as a hydraulic engineer.

She read authors such as Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as mystical literature and Eastern spiritual works.

[10] In the 1920s, the Surrealist movement was becoming popular with the Madrid art scene; the city hosted avant-garde intellectuals and artists such as Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel, Rafael Alberti, and Salvador Dalí.

Varo became attracted to the surreal, finding inspiration in the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya, and El Greco which she visited at the Museo del Prado.

[15] In Paris, Varo enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and quickly dropped out, realizing she did not want to remain within the confines of formal education.

Varo became part of a circle of other avant-garde artists, including José Luis Florit [Wikidata] and Óscar Domínguez,[13] and with Francés she came into contact with French Surrealists.

[19] By the summer of 1935, the tension and violence which had caused Varo and Lizárraga to leave Madrid had spread throughout Spain; the Spanish Civil War began the next year.

[20] It was in this context that Domínguez introduced Varo to French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, who had arrived in Barcelona in August 1936 to volunteer with the Republican faction.

Through Péret, Varo became acquainted with the inner circle of Surrealists, including André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Joan Miró, Wolfgang Paalen, and Leonora Carrington.

According to biographer Janet Kaplan, she may have fabricated being five years younger to fit more closely to the Surrealist ideal of the femme-enfant: an uncorrupted, childlike woman intuitively connected with the unconscious mind.

During the period of 1937–1939, Varo experimented with new techniques and influences, finding inspiration in the works of her friends Dalí, Ernst, Paalen, Brauner, and René Magritte.

[30] In 1939, the Nationalists claimed victory in Spain and Francisco Franco disallowed anyone associated with the Republicans from entering the country; Varo became permanently unable to return to her home and was isolated from her family.

[32] While viewing a documentary film on French internment camps by Hungarian photojournalist Emerico Weisz, by coincidence Varo recognized Gerardo Lizárraga, to whom she was still legally married.

They had lost contact when Varo left Spain, while Lizárraga remained to fight for the Republicans; when the Nationalists won, he fled to France and was imprisoned.

Varo and Péret found shelter with Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee, an organization dedicated to facilitating the migration of artists and intellectuals from wartime Europe to the Americas.

The Rescue Committee made appeals for funding of their travel to Mexico, and found places on the liner Serpa Pinto, due to depart from Casablanca, for them.

The Mexican government under Lázaro Cárdenas gave Spanish refugees asylum and automatic citizenship, with few restrictions on employment; the European émigrés therefore contributed significantly to Mexico's economy and culture.

Also within their circle was Gunther Gerzso, Kati Horna, Emerico Weisz, Dorothy Hood, Luis Buñuel, César Moro, Wolfgang Paalen, and Alice Rahon.

Péret moved back to Paris, and Varo started a relationship with a French pilot and fellow refugee named Jean Nicolle.

Varo, staying in Caracas and Maracay, studied mosquitoes with a microscope and produced drawings of them for a Public Ministry of Health campaign against malaria.

[47][48] In 1952 Varo married Austrian refugee Walter Gruen, and ended her career in commercial graphic design in favor of her personal art.

[52] Among all the refugees that were forced to flee from Europe to Mexico City during and after World War II, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Kati Horna formed a bond that would immensely affect their lives and work.

Although Horna did not meet the other two until they were all in Mexico City, she was already familiar with the work of Varo and Carrington after being given a few of their paintings by Edward James, a British poet and patron of the surrealist movement.

[54] After becoming friends, Varo and Carrington began writing collaboratively and wrote two plays together which were not published: El santo cuerpo grasoso and (unfinished) Lady Milagra.

[63] She turned with equal interest to the ideas of Carl Jung as to the theories of George Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Helena Blavatsky, Meister Eckhart, and the Sufis, and was as fascinated with the legend of the Holy Grail as with sacred geometry, witchcraft,[64] alchemy, and the I Ching.

"[65] In 1938 and 1939, Varo joined her closest companions Frances, Roberto Matta, and Gordon Onslow Ford in exploring the fourth dimension, basing much of their studies on Ouspensky's book Tertium Organum.

Her art and actions challenged the traditional patriarchy; Wolfgang Paalen encouraged her in this with his theories about the origins of civilization in matriarchal cultures, and the analogies between pre-classic Europe and pre-Mayan Mexico.

[66] Later in her career, her characters developed into her emblematic androgynous figures with heart-shaped faces, large almond eyes, and the aquiline noses that represent her own features.