The Spanish artist Remedios Varo (1908–1963) read Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe as a girl, and would bring their invention and portent into her paintings. Influenced first by the Surrealists in Spain, then by the Surrealists in Paris, Varo left Europe during W.W. II and settled in Mexico. Her paintings, filled with otherworldly inflections, are often populated by a single spectral woman with a long thin nose, Varo’s doppelgänger. The stylized buildings in her work seem to come from Giotto, as does her palette of earthy pastels. These visions are dreamlike yet precise. In Creation of the Birds (1957), for instance, an owl person in a strange lab forms a living bird from music, moonlight, and paint siphoned through two egg-shaped vessels. This exhibition at the Louisiana includes more than 70 works by Varo as well as drawings, notebooks and documentary material. It is Europe’s first major museum exhibition on the artist. —Laura Jacobs