Jeremy Lybarger at Art in America:
In “Science Fictions,” the Art Institute of Chicago presents more than 60 of Varo’s paintings and drawings, all made between 1955 and 1963, the year she died of a heart attack at 54. Long revered in Latin America, Varo has entered the canon more slowly in the United States. This is her first exhibition here in more than two decades. Like other female Surrealists, especially her friend and fellow émigré Leonora Carrington, who shares a similar animism and mystical iconography, Varo’s achievements are still being measured. This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences—chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more—cohere into a visionary whole.
The title of the exhibition alludes to Varo’s connoisseurship of science fiction, evinced by the volumes of Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury from her personal library that are on view. But the title also suggests the extent to which many of her paintings smudge the boundaries between science and the occult.
more here.