Remedios Varo Uranga was a Spanish-Mexican, para-surrealist painter.
She was born Maria de los Remedios Varo Uranga in Angles, Girona,Spain in 1908.
During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was largely influenced
by the surrealist movement.
She met her husband, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Peret,
in Barcelona. She was forced into exile from Paris during the Nazi occupation of France
and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941.

She initially considered Mexico

a temporary haven,

but would remain in Latin America for the rest of her life.
She had an early abortion due to the economic realities of her life.
Due to the abortion, she could not become pregnant again.
In Mexico she met native artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
Her strongest ties were to other exiles and expatriates,
notably the English painter Leonora Carrington and her great love,
the French pilot and adventurer, Jean Nicolle.
Her last major relationship was with Walter Gruen,
an Austrian who had endured concentration camps before escaping Europe.
Gruen believed fiercely in Varo,
and gave her the support that allowed her to fully concentrate on her painting.

After 1949 Varo developed her remarkable mature style,
which remains beautifully enigmatic and instantly recognizable.
She often worked in oil on masonite panels she prepared herself.
Although her colors have the blended resonance of the oil medium,
her brushwork often involved many fine strokes of paint laid closely together -
a technique more reminiscent of egg tempera.
She died at the height of her career from a heart-attack in Mexico City in 1963.