Remedios Varo was born 1908 in Angles, Spain. Attended convent schools and the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid; after a brief marriage to a fellow student, met and married the Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret in Barcelona where she had moved to become part of a more avant-garde milieu. Settled in Paris with Peret at the end of the Spanish Civil War and was active in Surrealist circles there between 1937 and 1939.

Forced to flee France for political reasons. In November 1941, after a long and difficult journey, the couple arrived in Mexico. During the early 1950s, Varo became involved with the followers of Gurdjieff, and with Tibetan Tantric and Zen Buddhism. First one-woman exhibition in 1956 at the Galeria Diana in Mexico City; her retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1971 drew the largest audiences in Mexican history.