‘Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood streams.’ So wrote Leonora Carrington, one of the ‘three witches’ of Surrealism that found friendship in Mexico City, following a mass exodus of artists, writers and poets fleeing war-torn Europe at the dawn of the 1940s. Her adopted compatriots were Remedios Varo and Kati Horna, who together created a visual language that spoke to their shared interest in the practices of the arcane and the occult, where celestial beings and disembodied spirits exist in a realm that is nevertheless rooted in a ‘reality’ of disquieting domesticity.
The trio began their lives in disparate places, yet they all resisted societal expectations to conform. Carrington railed again the constraints of a privileged childhood in the north of England, running away to Paris and soon taking up with her lover, fellow Surrealist Max Ernst. After suffering a psychological breakdown, she was interned at a facility in Santander (the echoes of this experience are evident in her work) before leaving for Mexico in 1943, by way of New York.
Varo, on the other hand, was raised in Madrid. Her academic training included enrolment at the San Fernando fine arts academy – a rare feat for a woman at the time – where she studied the works of Bosch and Goya. Her father was a hydraulic engineer, who taught her advanced mathematics and technical drawing abilities that are more than evident in her beautifully articulated worlds of mystical machinations and imagined architecture. She too moved to Paris, to escape the Spanish civil war and seek out the Surrealist circle that represented the antithesis of her formal studies. Following imprisonment on suspected espionage charges, she fled France for Mexico in 1941.
For Horna, the avant-garde possibilities of photography were hardwired at an early age. She was born in Budapest to an upper-class family and studied the artform alongside her childhood friend Robert Capa. Her early twenties were spent in Berlin, rubbing shoulders with Walter Benjamin and the great constructivist photographer László Moholy-Nagy. Although she, too, was caught by the allure of Paris, her politics led her into the heart of the war in Spain, where she worked as a photojournalist throughout Barcelona, the Aragon front and various remote villages. Her images focused on the destruction of everyday life – a subjects which stayed with her when she journeyed to Mexico in 1939 with ‘my Rolleiflex around my neck, and nothing else’.
While these three women were surely haunted by the shadows by their former lives, they found new forms of unbridled expression in Mexico City, which was intensified by their close creative relationship. Horna used her friends as photographic models, to create unsettling tableaus filled with spectral allusions. For example, in her 1962 series ‘Oda a la Necrofilia’ (ode to necrophilia), Carrington poses. In some cases, the artist appears undressed, her body twisted in various guises against a rumpled bed, or else shrouded in black, like an ominous shadow. Whatever her positioning, she is always presented in dialogue with a Modernist death mask. In several shots it lies on the pillow, like a deceased lover. One such image is currently on show at Galería RGR in Mexico City, as part of the exhibition Spiritual Abstractions which runs until 21 November.
In another, earlier photograph from 1957, Horna takes a rather sedate portrait of Varo, at least in compositional terms. Yet she is wearing an elaborate mask of Carrington’s creation, which distorts the body so that her friend’s head appears encased by gasping faces. It is a stunning example of the collaborative ingenuity the three shared.
This image also speaks to Horna’s origins in reportage. Alongside her staged tableaus, she took more candid pictures of her friends at work at the easel, having dinner, and generally going about daily life. Her archive speaks to an artistic existence that touched all corners of their lives, with children and husbands and pets and groceries and parties all thrown into the mix. In the wonderful biography Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington (written by the artist’s cousin, Joanna Moorhead) her eldest son Gabriel recalls ‘We would have lunch together and supper together, and parties together. It was like an extended family – and we had no connection with our actual family.’
Carrington’s oeuvre extended across painting, sculpture and writing (she modelled the main characters in her novella The Hearing Trumpet on herself and Varo), but it is fair to say that her works on canvas are her best-known. While at first glance her fantastical scenes might seem like pure fiction, the places and objects she depicts are charged with meaning, in as much as they become characters themselves. In The Inventory (1956), for example, the Gothic revival mansion she grew up in looms large against the presence of shamanic men perched on gigantic birds. In Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen (1975), the enormous range and cavernous kitchen is modelled on her grandmother’s own home in Ireland. The room is inhabited by mythical beasts, including a white goose from Celtic mythology and evidence of Mexican mysticism. The creatures stand among a magic circle, preparing vegetables and pastes that draw a direct connection between household acts such as preparing food, with those of healing and enchantment.
By bringing such concrete manifestations of domesticity into her otherworldly images, Carrington points to the mysticism all around us, which exists not only in fairy tales, but throughout everyday life, and deep within the soul.
Varo shared a similar fascination with unveiling the world of the arcane through her visions of vaulted towers, hybrid creatures and unfathomable contraptions. She created a unique surreal language by utilising her considerable scientific and mathematical knowledge – not to mention a vested interest in psychology – to build entirely new symbolism. In Useless Science, or The Alchemist (1955), the trope of the male alchemist is replaced with a woman who appears to be distilling vapours from the air. Her cloak has formed from the chequerboard floor below, with the painting’s colour palette alluding to the four-stage chemical reaction believed to result in the elixir of eternal life.
The artist’s stunning technical precision and predilection for scientific theory informs the title of a major new exhibition in Chicago: Science Fictions. Varo always strove to find a sense of balance, new ways in which auditory and visceral experience could be articulated in a visual form. In Armonía (Harmony) (1956), for example, the gentle notes plucked from a mythical stave seem to invoke some mysterious force, where tiles slowly lift from the floor, allowing the ghostly limbs and tendrils of nature to spring forth. For Varo, these incredible ethereal realms were not simply figments of fantasy, but complex renderings designed to engender a deeper understanding of the realities of human existence. These were her visions of the inner psyche, of memory and emotion, as they relate to the objects and people that surround us. In her eyes, the truth was simple: ‘The dream world and the real world are the same.’
‘Remedios Varo: Science Fictions’ runs at the Art Institute of Chicago (01 312 443 3600; artic.edu) until 27 November 2023