Remedios Varo’s Dreamlike Worlds Head to the Louisiana Museum in 2026
A major exhibition devoted to Spanish artist Remedios Varo (1908–1963) will open at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the coastal museum north of Copenhagen, this fall. Titled “Painting Magic,” the show will present about 70 works across paintings, drawings, and photographs from September 18, 2026, through January 10, 2027, before traveling to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
The exhibition arrives as Varo’s reputation continues to widen well beyond the circles that first sustained her career. Born in Spain, she moved to Paris at 19, where she entered the orbit of André Breton, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and Leonora Carrington. In the early 1940s, she settled in Mexico City, the city where her work found its fullest expression and where she mounted successful exhibitions in 1955 and 1958.
Varo died of a heart attack in 1963, still not as widely known outside Mexico as some of her peers. Yet her work has long occupied a distinctive place in 20th-century art: precise, enigmatic, and steeped in a private visual logic that resists easy classification. She is often grouped with Frida Kahlo and Carrington as one of the preeminent female Mexican Surrealist painters, though Varo herself consistently rejected that label.
Among the works included in the Louisiana presentation are “Exploración de las fuentes del río Orinoco,” “The Magician or the Juggler,” “La huida (The Flight),” “Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista (Woman leaving the psychoanalyst’s office),” “Roulotte (Caravan),” “Naturaleza muerta resucitando (Still life coming to life again),” “Papilla estelar (Star porridge),” and “Encuentro (Encounter).” The loans come from prominent private collections and museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Galleries of Scotland.
For museums and audiences alike, the show offers a chance to see how Varo built a body of work that feels at once intimate and cosmically ordered — a vision that has only grown more resonant with time.
