VARO & KAHLO

TWO GREAT WOMEN


DETAILS

Remedio Varo was a Spanish-Mexican surrealist artist who challenged the male stereotypes of women in art, used only as models and objects, and created her own narrative that was very much "woman" in "subjective" visual arts poetry and she was only one of a very few women of the moment who did this!

Born in Girona, Spain in 1908, she studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid with Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel  and Garcia Lorca. 

During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement.

She met her second husband, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, in Barcelona. She was forced into exile from Paris during the German occupation of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941.

She died in 1963, at the height of her career, from a heart attack, in Mexico City.


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Frida Kahlo made herself famous by challenging the objective world of realist art and looked into her own face to find a subject and truly unique form of representational art.

Daunted by the cruelty of illness and personal tragedy, she chose to overcome defeat and she pursuits positivism and revolution that led to a body of artwork, which span over her 30-year career.

All of her artworks demonstrated a fierce sense of pride in her heritage that flew in the face of traditional European art school movements.


She also had a very real, if not obsessive, passion for her marriage and husband who didn't follow the bourgeois and Catholic traditions monogamous relationships yet he loved her and cared for her to the end of her life.

Frida was an artist who truly understood the spirit of the human condition and its ability to rise above pain, suffering and disappointment in order to participate in the precious essence of life. 

This lecture and slideshow presentation will not only explore the dynamics of early 20th century European and Mexican art, it will enhance the life of Frida Kahlo and her artworks as gifts of expressive, visionary self-interpretations. 


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