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. The subtitle of the Art Institute’s Varo retrospective—“Science Fictions”—is a good way to describe the otherworldly inflections in her art, which is often populated by a single spectral woman with a long thin nose, her doppelgänger. The stylized buildings in Varo’s work seem to come from Giotto, as does her palette of earthy pastels. Her 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 of 20 works by Varo, with additional materials from her archive, is not to be missed. —Laura Jacobs