Varo was born in Anglés, near Girona, Spain. As a child she was sensitive to the frequent uprooting of her family to follow her engineer father. She studied art in Madrid and moved several times between Paris and Spain, where she met the leading Surrealist artists and participated in avant-garde exhibitions. Escaping Nazi occupation, Varo and her husband French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret made their permanent home in Mexico City in 1941, where many exiled Surrealists had already fled. Varo separated from Péret and initially made a meager living as a commercial artist and illustrator in Mexico City. At the encouragement of Walter Gruen, Austrian exile and successful businessman, she was able to completely devote herself to painting during the last eleven years of her life. Her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Diana in 1955 was a huge success and earned her international recognition.

Varo became skilled in Surrealist automatism, a practice where several artists work together to devise unforeseen subjects with smoke or wax on paper or canvas. Varo limited her own palette to somber oranges, light browns, shadowy grays and greens. Her paintings are carefully drawn, making the astonishing stories or mystic legends especially convincing. Rejecting the male-dominated language of Surrealist doctrine, Varo often painted magnificent heroines busy with alchemical activities. A delicate figure may spin and weave tiny threads transforming them into musical instruments or fashion them into paintings of small birds. The settings are often medieval tower rooms equipped with occult laboratory devices. Figures wearing tattered garments may emerge from a forest of withered trees. Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco, 1959, depicts a woman in a derby hat and stylish coat confidently sailing an orange egg-shaped boat, powered by miniature angel wings and a fish’s tail, with a compass securing her passage through columns of submerged trees. Varo borrowed from Romanesque Catalan frescoes and medieval architecture, mixed nature and technology, and combined reality and fantasy to create worlds that elude time and space.

Varo died of a heart attack at the height of her fame in her home in Mexico City in 1963. Since that time, her works have been seen in over a dozen solo exhibitions and nearly one hundred group shows worldwide.