The Surrealist painter Remedios Varo grew up in a strictly Catholic household. Her family moved between Spain and North Africa, and she was educated in convents. Religious constraints weren’t for her, so she rebelled and went to art school, eventually moving to Paris in 1937. Time spent between Barcelona and Paris exposed Varo to modernist thinkers such as Esteban Francés, Oscar Domínguez, and Marcel Jean (who collaborated with her on a 1935 collage using the cadaver exquis technique—French for “exquisite corpse”). Escaping the Nazi invasion, in 1941, she secured a passage to Mexico and crossed the Atlantic. Life in exile was good to Varo. She befriended Leonora Carrington, with whom she remained close for the rest of her life, and developed her striking mature style. This exhibition makes the 1959 painting Encuentro (Encounter) its centerpiece. Ethereal and eerie, a wraith wrapped in blue sits at a table and looks into an open box: from within the box, her own face stares back. A myth? A vision? A horror story? “The dream world and the real world are the same,” Varo said. —Elena Clavarino