Through the looking-glass: the interartistic practice of Remedios Varo
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Date
2019
Authors
Albaladejo Garcia, Nadia
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Publisher
University College Cork
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Abstract
This thesis sets out to map and explore the interartistic practice and relations developed in the creative production of twentieth-century woman artist and writer, Remedios Varo i Uranga (Anglès, Girona 1908 - Mexico City, 1963), who achieved significant international recognition for one aspect of her work: her paintings. I explore and analyse key examples of her interartistic practice throughout her career. These include: Varo’s literary experiments, co-creating the surrealist play El santo cuerpo grasoso with Leonora Carrington; the commercial commissions she carried out for Bayer which is here read in relation to their context of publication; her best-known sculptural work, Homo rodans, examined in relation to the hybrid text which accompanied it and the various traces of its performative composition; and her most famous ‘treatise’ on interartistic practice, the painting La creación de las aves, which is read alongside a selection of her dream narratives. These works are primarily analysed using an interdisciplinary framework that includes cultural and literary studies, theatre and performance studies as well as anthropology and philosophy. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that the extant critical insistence on translating her into a single dominant frame or worldview, even while recognising the importance of her diasporic mobility, ultimately reduces the liminal, performative and often playful nature of her work and downplays her capacity to negotiate and move between different languages, cultures, media and disciplines.
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Keywords
Interdisciplinarity , Surrealism , Women's studies , Art history , Exile , Spanish art , Mexican art
Citation
Albaladejo Garcia, N. 2019. Through the looking-glass: the interartistic practice of Remedios Varo. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.