At the beginning of the 20th century, Paris erupted with a hunger to reinvent art, becoming the cultural and artistic epicenter that attracted poets, painters, filmmakers, and creators, giving rise to new forms of artistic expression: Cubism shattered reality, Surrealism opened passageways to the subconscious, and Fauvism set the canvas ablaze with color. These movements were seen by many as provocations or mockeries of classical art. Paris became a hub of creative effervescence, a magnet for poets, a refuge for dissenting creative minds—among them María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga, better known as Remedios Varo, a surrealist painter born in Anglès, Catalonia, Spain in 1908.
However, history would soon close its doors on her. After the Spanish Civil War, returning to her homeland became impossible. Already in French exile, Varo faced a new threat: the rise of Nazi ideology during World War II, the Vichy regime, and the hostile environment of Nazi-occupied France, where Jews, communists, foreigners, Spanish republicans, and avant-garde artists were persecuted in the name of protecting the regime—all deemed "undesirable elements."
During this time, Varo maintained an intense romantic relationship with surrealist political poet Benjamin Péret, a prominent figure in the anti-fascist movement in Europe and a suspect under the Vichy regime of Philippe Pétain, a puppet government serving Nazi interests in France. Her relationship with Péret, combined with her identity as a republican artist with anti-fascist leanings, quickly made Varo a target of suspicion. Both Péret and Varo were arrested by French authorities: Péret was imprisoned in an internment camp, while Remedios Varo was forced to live in hiding.
With help from the Emergency Rescue Committee, led by American journalist Varian Fry—who operated a secret rescue network for persecuted artists and intellectuals in occupied Europe—Péret was freed. Mexico, under President Lázaro Cárdenas, had opened its doors to receive republican refugees and other political exiles from Europe, victims of fascism. In 1941, through a stroke of luck, political contacts, false documents, and international aid, Remedios Varo and Benjamin Péret managed to escape by ship from Marseille, crossing the Atlantic to reach Mexico.
The first years in Mexico were marked by economic hardship. Varo, holding multiple jobs, unrecognized as an artist and with limited financial resources, began working as a commercial illustrator for pharmaceutical laboratories, including the German company Bayer. There, she created medical pamphlets, detailed drawings of the digestive system, blood circulation, and other anatomical illustrations. As these were commissioned works, they were not signed by the artist; yet over time, the technique, style, and linework have been attributed to Varo’s hand.
Starting in 1947, Remedios Varo began receiving advertising commissions, designing posters for Bayer. These pieces were signed using her maternal surname, Uranga—a decision made to distinguish her commercial work from her more personal and intimate artistic creations
Through her surrealist style, Varo managed to transmute science into images charged with emotion, symbols of human fragility, and visual narratives that go beyond explanation to touch existential depths. In these medically themed advertising pieces, her hand was not tamed by scientific rigor, but liberated by poetic impulse and a critical vision of the body—transforming pain into a visual metaphor of illness and nature. She did not portray the body as a broken machine, but as an inner landscape where biological storms, daily anxieties, and primitive forms of fear unfold.
Remedios Varo’s work for Bayer is a testament to how art, even when commissioned and born from economic necessity, can expand the limits of what is visible and sayable. A true explorer of the body through brush, metaphor, and science.
