Where to See Remedios Varo Paintings Around the World

There are artists whose paintings can be found in major museums throughout the world, and then there is Remedios Varo. Finding her work requires a little more searching—and that somehow feels appropriate for an artist whose paintings invite us into secret rooms, mysterious laboratories, enchanted forests, strange machines, and worlds that seem to exist somewhere between dreams and reality. Born in Spain in 1908, Varo eventually settled in Mexico after fleeing Europe during World War II, and it was there that she developed the fantastical visual language for which she is now celebrated. Her paintings combine Surrealism with science, alchemy, mysticism, psychology, architecture, nature, and an imagination entirely her own. Because Varo produced fewer than 200 oil paintings and many remain in private collections, encountering one in person can feel like making a discovery. Fortunately, several museums preserve extraordinary examples of her work—and Museo can help you find them.

If you love Remedios Varo, there is one place that belongs above every other destination on your list: Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderno.

The museum's relationship with Varo stretches back decades, and today it safeguards the Colección Isabel Gruen Varsoviano, the most complete museum collection of her work. The collection contains 39 works along with an extraordinary archive encompassing preparatory drawings, notebooks, photographs, correspondence, books, personal possessions, and other materials that provide a rare window into Varo's imagination and working process.

And right now is an especially incredible time to visit.

The museum is presenting Remedios Varo: Habitantes de lo insólito, an exhibition devoted to the strange and captivating universe she created. Rather than simply gathering finished paintings, the exhibition explores how those worlds came into existence through paintings, preparatory sketches, notebooks, personal books, and other objects connected to her creative life. The Museo de Arte Moderno currently lists the exhibition as continuing through 2027, making Mexico City one of the world's essential art destinations for Varo admirers right now.

Several paintings already mapped on Museo can be found within this remarkable collection. Ciencia inútil o El alquimista gives us one of the subjects most closely associated with Varo: a solitary figure engaged in a mysterious experiment that seems simultaneously scientific and magical. The character operates an elaborate apparatus while the tiled floor itself appears to rise and become part of the figure's clothing, collapsing the boundaries between person, architecture, and machine.

Then there is La creación de las aves, one of Varo's most celebrated images. Its strange birdlike artist sits at a desk creating birds that seemingly come to life, aided by a violin-shaped instrument and light arriving through a prism. Art, science, music, nature, and creation all converge in a single impossible room—the kind of place that could only exist in Remedios Varo's universe.

Museo users have also mapped El gato helecho, Guajolote navideño, and Paraíso de los gatos, revealing another recurring fascination in Varo's work: animals that refuse to remain ordinary animals. Cats, birds, plants, people, and objects seem capable of transforming into one another, as though nature operates according to entirely different rules inside her paintings.

For anyone who has only encountered Varo through books or screens, seeing so many of these works together is an extraordinary opportunity. If there is such a thing as a Remedios Varo pilgrimage, it begins in Mexico City.

One of Varo's great masterpieces crossed into a major American museum collection relatively recently. At New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Juggler (The Magician) offers an unforgettable introduction to the elaborate worlds she constructed.

Painted in 1956, the work centers on a magician performing from an extraordinary traveling cart. Before him stands a crowd of nearly identical figures wrapped together in gray fabric, while strange objects, vessels, animals, and architectural forms surround the performance.

Look closely at the magician's face, and the painting becomes even more unusual: Varo incorporated mother-of-pearl into the work, giving the central figure a luminous quality unlike ordinary painted flesh.

The painting is quintessential Varo. A scientific demonstration could be a magic ritual. A machine might behave like a living creature. A traveling cart could resemble a sailboat moving across land. Nothing operates quite according to the laws of our world.

MoMA's collection also contains early Varo works, including The Tower (La torre) and a collaborative Exquisite Corpse created during her European years. Together, they provide an opportunity to encounter both the mature artist we recognize immediately and the younger Varo experimenting within European Surrealism before Mexico transformed her career.

The Juggler (The Magician) is part of MoMA's collection but is not currently listed as on view, so travelers should check its status before planning a visit specifically around the painting.

At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, visitors can encounter one of Varo's rare large-scale paintings: Tailleur pour dames, or Ladies' Tailor.

Painted in 1957, the work presents a fashion salon unlike any you'll encounter while shopping. Strange elongated women model elaborate garments whose designs seem to ignore every rule of ordinary clothing. One ensemble resembles a boat, another becomes an architectural structure, and the entire scene feels as though fashion, engineering, and fantasy have somehow collided.

This ability to take an ordinary human activity and transform it into something mysterious was one of Varo's great strengths. Her characters cook, sew, travel, paint, study, experiment, and build—but never quite in ways that belong to our reality.

The painting is particularly significant because Varo's large works are uncommon. The Museum of Fine Arts acquired Tailleur pour dames in 2021, making it the first Varo painting to enter the museum's collection and, at the time of acquisition, the only work by the artist in a New England museum collection.

Better still for anyone planning a Varo trip: the museum currently lists Tailleur pour dames as on view in its Art of the Americas galleries.

Washington, D.C., recently became another important destination on the Remedios Varo map when the National Gallery of Art acquired Banqueros en acción (Bankers in Action), painted in 1962 near the end of Varo's life.

The painting presents a group of elongated bankers floating through an architectural environment, their dark clothing and top hats giving them an almost uniform appearance. Nearby, a woman hides from them behind a curved wall.

Like so much of Varo's work, the scene refuses to provide a simple explanation. Are the bankers threatening? Ridiculous? Powerful? Trapped within the very system they represent? Varo leaves enough ambiguity for viewers to construct their own story.

The National Gallery has suggested that the painting may reflect Varo's interest in authority and social conformity, themes that become especially intriguing when considered alongside her own experiences with political upheaval, war, displacement, and exile.

The museum acquired both the finished painting and a preparatory drawing, creating a wonderful opportunity to understand just how carefully Varo constructed scenes that ultimately feel like dreams. Her paintings may appear spontaneous and fantastical, but beneath that magic was an artist with an extraordinarily precise working method.

Long before Remedios Varo became one of the great figures associated with Surrealism in Mexico, she was a young Spanish artist finding her place among the European avant-garde.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid preserves several works from this earlier chapter of her career, including La Faim (The Hunger), Modernidad (Modernity), Mujer o el espíritu de la noche (Woman or Spirit of the Night), and Alegoría del invierno (Allegory of Winter).

La Faim, created in 1938, is particularly fascinating because it once belonged to André Breton, one of the central figures of the Surrealist movement. Its forms are noticeably different from the intricate, elongated characters and architectural worlds that would define Varo's mature paintings, allowing visitors to see an artist who was still experimenting and absorbing ideas from the Surrealist circles surrounding her in Paris.

The Reina Sofía therefore offers something Mexico City cannot: a glimpse of Varo before Mexico.

That makes Madrid an important stop for anyone trying to understand the full arc of her career. Her later paintings did not emerge from nowhere. They grew from years of academic training, experimentation in Barcelona and Paris, engagement with Surrealism, and eventually the profound experience of exile.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), visitors can trace Varo even farther back through an Exquisite Corpse created in 1935 with fellow Surrealists Oscar Domínguez and Esteban Francés.

An exquisite corpse is a collaborative Surrealist exercise in which multiple artists contribute to a drawing or composition, often without fully seeing what the others have created. The resulting images can become wonderfully strange combinations of bodies, objects, and unexpected forms.

It isn't the mature Remedios Varo of La creación de las aves or Ciencia inútil. And that's precisely what makes it interesting.

Seeing early experiments like this helps reveal how Varo's imagination developed. Before her mysterious towers, alchemists, hybrid creatures, and elaborate machines appeared, she was participating in the playful experimentation of the European Surrealist movement.

SFMOMA notes that works in its collection are not necessarily on view at all times, so visitors interested specifically in seeing the piece should check its current status before arriving.

Following Remedios Varo around the world isn't quite like following Monet, Van Gogh, or Picasso. Her paintings don't appear in dozens of museums in nearly every major city. They are rarer, more concentrated, and often harder to find.

That scarcity makes encountering one feel particularly special.

Varo's own life crossed borders just as dramatically as her paintings cross the boundaries between reality and imagination. Born in Spain, immersed in Surrealist circles in Barcelona and Paris, forced into exile by war, and eventually building her mature career in Mexico City, she carried pieces of many worlds with her. In Mexico, those influences combined with her fascination with science, alchemy, mysticism, literature, psychology, nature, and the occult to produce something that ultimately belonged to no movement but her own.

Today, the greatest concentration of that universe remains in Mexico City. The current Remedios Varo: Habitantes de lo insólito exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno makes this an especially remarkable moment to experience her work in person. But pieces of her story can also be found in New York, Boston, Washington, Madrid, San Francisco, and beyond.

That's exactly what makes searching for an artist on Museo so much fun. Start with a painting you love, see where it has been mapped, and suddenly you may have another museum—or even another city—to add to your travels.

With Remedios Varo, you aren't simply looking for paintings.

You're looking for doorways into another world.

Don't forget to follow Remedios Varo on Museo if she is one of your favorites!

—The Museo Docent