But in 2002, when dealer Wendi Norris visited the British-born artist at her home in Mexico, Carrington was known primarily to Surrealism enthusiasts. One was the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who wrote what is now regarded as the most important book about female Surrealists (now in its second edition); Chadwick recommended that Norris seek out Carrington.

Norris, who was just getting her start as a dealer, followed Chadwick’s tip, expecting to spend just a few hours with the artist. She ended up chatting with Carrington all day—mostly about politics and literature, not art, as was Carrington’s preference. But because Norris did not initially come out of the art world, she brought a perspective to Carrington’s paintings that the artist prized.

“I don’t have an art history background. I have an economics background,” the San Francisco–based dealer told ARTnews, speaking by phone. “She really appreciated my way of viewing her paintings. She knew I was seeing something in a way that wasn’t through a scholarly lens, but in the way most people probably would.”

That first visit was the start of a friendship and business relationship between Norris and Carrington that lasted through the artist’s death in 2011, and continues to this day via her estate. In 2022, Norris’s gallery lent one of the five paintings by Carrington—Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), featuring a lithe figure whose neck sprouts a flowering branch—that featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale. This week, her gallery will spotlight Carrington’s art once more, this time at Art Basel, the world’s most preeminent art fair, where Norris’s dealership is making its Swiss debut.

The booth will feature Portrait of Madame Dupin and other gems by Carrington, including one piece that includes text Carrington wrote backwards, so that it is only legible when a mirror is held to it. (“I think only Carrington and Leonardo da Vinci were able to do that,” Norris conjectured.) Dealers regularly bring older works to Art Basel, but these Carringtons are likely to be some of the most art historically important pieces at the fair this year.

Their presence in Norris’s booth testifies to her commitment to Surrealism, a movement which her gallery has quietly helped rewrite in the past decade. Although Norris’s gallery is not limited to Surrealism specifically, with contemporary artists such as Chitra Ganesh and María Magdalena Campos-Pons on her roster, it is shows for modernists such as Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo that have defined her programming. Norris has been exhibiting these artists for over a decade, but only recently have they begun appearing regularly in blockbuster exhibitions that reassess Surrealism, often by adding more women and non-European artists to the movement’s canon.

But, Norris said, “I didn’t start out wanting to represent Surrealists.” In fact, she didn’t start out in the art world at all.

While studying economics during the ’90s, she spent time abroad in Madrid, where she was given the option to take one class outside her chosen discipline. She chose to take an art history course, and as part of it, she visited the Prado. “I remember just standing in front of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” she recalled. “I had goosebumps.”

Though she had a strong attachment to art, Norris continued to pursue a business career, graduating in 1996 from Georgetown University with an MBA and soon taking a job as a Paris-based director of strategic planning for the biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb. After that, she worked for several years at Scale Eight, which she recalls as a “really geeky data storage company that was probably ahead of its time.”

Then the dot-com bubble burst, and Norris sought a new direction. “I decided I needed to change what I was doing and do something that I loved, and I just kind of came to it naturally,” Norris said of her transition to the art world. “I had no real idea about the art industry—and it is an industry. Thankfully, I had a business background where I analyzed industries, so I was able to get a sense of it. But it took a while.” She went on to open her eponymous gallery in 2002.

Gallerists are generally not fond of talking publicly about their businesses in percentages and numbers, but Norris credits her business background with making her comfortable with doing just that. In 2017, amid a wave of gallery closures, Norris made the decision to turn her space nomadic, staging shows beyond one base in San Francisco. In an Artsy op-ed, she said that “less than 10 percent” of the gallery’s sales were actually done in its space in San Francisco. “The data,” she wrote, “is not adding up for me or for my artists with respect to maintaining a stationary gallery space.”

It was a gamble, and Norris said it paid off. Through the offsite program, she has staged shows by Carrington and Varo in New York. The Carrington one, held in 2019, ended up in New York Times critic Roberta Smith’s list of the top art shows of the year. The Museum of Modern Art bought a Carrington painting from that show that now hangs in the institution’s Surrealism gallery.

Since the pandemic, however, most of Norris’s shows have been staged in San Francisco, whether at the gallery’s headquarters or elsewhere in the city. She said she is now more focused on “helping my artists realize their visions and meeting them where they are.”

And part of that project has been finding unusual forms of crossover between her Surrealists and the contemporary artists she represents.

Norris said that María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who recently had a Brooklyn Museum survey, joined the gallery in the first place because it had shown work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born Surrealist who made a name for herself in Mexico. Campos-Pons’s first show was with Norris’s gallery in 2017; the catalogue for her 2023 Brooklyn show ended up featuring a reproduction of a Varo painting within its first few pages.

Last year, Campos-Pons won a MacArthur “genius” award, a moment that Norris has continued to celebrate alongside the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of the Carrington painting earlier this year. “I want to continue to be the catalyst for these momentous art moments for each and every one of my artists,” Norris said.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Varo produced works depicting artists and intellectuals in intricate dream-like settings. Her career took off in those years after relocating to Mexico City as a refugee during World War II. Six decades after her death in 1963, her market is growing, and her status within art history is rising, with her work set to be included in this year’s Venice Biennale.

The MFA Boston’s new acquisition, Tailleur pour dames (1957), depicts a tailor’s showroom, where four women are outfitted in garments that each appear to take on new transformations—a dress converts into a boat, a scarf becomes a seat, and a purple cape floats into the air. It is one of fewer than 200 oil paintings that Varo created during her lifetime and one of only several large-scale works she ever made, most of which remain in private collections. It’s also the first painting by Varo to enter the museum’s collection, and the only one by the artist held by a public collection in New England.

In January, the Toledo Museum of Art announced that it acquired Varo’s 1956 work on paper Cazadora de astros (La luna aprisionada), depicting a female hunter capturing the moon. The museum called the work a “tour-de-force.”

The MFA’s Varo will go on public view on March 17 as part of a rehang of the museum’s 20th-century art holdings, where it will figure in a gallery showcasing works from Latin America. As part of a move to raise funds for the new acquisitions of modern works, the museum is selling three paintings from its Americas collection by Georgia O’Keeffe and Charles Sheeler this year.

Calling Varo “one of the most compelling Surrealists of the 20th century,” MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum said in a statement, “It is exciting that we will now begin to be able to tell the story of this international artistic movement through the art of a woman who worked in Latin America.”

Over the past few decades, Citibanamex, acting through its cultural foundation, has amassed some 2,000 artworks, spanning from the 18th century to today, and including oil paintings, watercolors, and works on paper. With a strong inclination toward Mexican artists and national themes, it is among the most significant private collections in the country. In a statement, Citibanamex stressed that it will not offer individual works for sale. Instead, the entire collection will be included in the bank’s sale. 

The business group that decides to buy the bank will acquire works by some of the most influential Mexican artists, including Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as important expatriate artists who lived for extended periods in the country, like Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Daniel Thomas Egerton, and Johann Moritz Rugendas.

At a press conference this week, Alberto Gómez Alcalá, corporate director of Institutional Development, Economic Studies and Communication at Citibanamex, stressed that it was impossible to assign a value to the collection. He added that any potential buyer must commit to the preservation of the bank’s cultural property, which “is a critical and indivisible part of what is for sale,” Gómez Alcalá said.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s President Andres Manuel López Obrador has said that whatever the outcome, the collection should remain in Mexico. Mexico’s Foreign Secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, proposed on Twitter that the bank’s cultural heritage become national property.

“We’re talking about buildings and art collections of the best painters of Mexico and of the world,” López Obrador said at a press briefing on Monday. “It’s cultural patrimony, and we’re looking for it to stay in our country.”

This comes amid renewed determination by the Mexican government to stop sales of cultural patrimony outside the country. Last fall, Mexican authorities succeeded in canceling an auction of Mexican artifacts in Rome. The Mexican cultural ambassador secured every piece that had yet to be sold and blocked the delivery of the artifacts that had already been bought.

Among the modern artworks included in the Citibanamex collection are Rivera’s May Day Parade in Moscow (1956), which captures the exuberance around the celebrations staged for the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution; Kahlo’s The Fruits of the Earth (1938), one of her largest still-life paintings; and Siqueiros’s Woman with Metate (1931), a portrait of a woman working a stone tool used to process grain.

The Citibanamex Cultural Foundation is a major patron of the arts in Mexico and maintains several landmark venues around the capital. Its headquarters is an 18th-century mansion that became the home of General Agustín de Iturbide, a Mexican independence leader who briefly served as emperor and was later executed. A large portion of the collection is exhibited free of charge in the Palace of the Counts of San Mateo de Valparaíso, located in the historic center of Mexico City.

During the press briefing, López Obrador called on Mexican investors to acquire Citibanamex, but added that his administration would not interfere with a sale that would benefit the state.

“We’re going to look at the legal aspects, but we do not want to create problems for the sale or create obstacles, because we want to show that in Mexico there is true rule of law and there are guarantees for investors,” he said.

Costantini won the works—the Lam, an abstract cubist-inspired painting; the Varo, an interior scene depicting a seated lone figure— during a Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art evening sale in New York that counted among the first major auctions held following lockdown. It was intended to spotlight Latin American artworks that had long been excluded from marquee 20th-century art evening sales. 

“It is very difficult for this type of superlative works to appear in the open market,” said Costantini in a statement. “When they do, I try to buy them because it can take fifty years to see them again.”

The Lam work, which Constantini bought for $9.6 million, surpassed the previous record for the most expensive painting by a Latin American artist to sell at auction. It surpassed a record minted in 2018 by Diego Rivera’s painting Los rivales (1931), which was went for $9.76 million during a sale of David Rockefeller’s collection at Christie’s in New York.

Costantini also said that he had put $25 million toward MALBA, which is set to display the Lam and Varo works after three decades held in private hands.

The collector also bought surrealist Alice Rahon’s Autorretrato (1951) and Mario Carreño’s Paisaje cubano (1943) during the same Sotheby’s sale for a collected $381,000.

In death and life, Varo was defined by her Surrealist associations. After fleeing her native Spain, the French poet Benjamin Péret introduced her to the Parisian avant-garde crowd, whose members she exhibited and studied alongside. Varo worked within a psychoanalytic framework, but her approach left little to accident or automatism. She was a meticulous architect of dreamscapes, planning well in advance the symbology that operated as roadmaps to her autobiography, though she rejected affiliation with the Surrealists, telling an interviewer in 1957, “I was with an open mouth within this group of brilliant and gifted people. I was together with them because I felt a certain affinity. Today I do not belong to any group.” 

Below is a guide to Varo’s life and the many influences that shaped her creations.

Early exposure to religion, Romanticism, and science made an indelible impact on her imagination.

She was born María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga in northeast Spain in 1908. Her father was a hydraulic engineer, whose profession often uprooted the family. Having recognized her artistic talent early, he had Varo reproduce his technical engineering sketches. An intellectual and a believer in universalism, the philosophical concept that certain ideas recur in all cultures, he introduced her to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Alexandre Dumas, and Hieronymus Bosch. She was provided texts on mysticism, science, and philosophy. Her mother, in contrast, was a devout Catholic (Varo was named after the Virgin of Los Remedios). At 15, her parents enrolled her at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the alma mater of Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso.

Varo rebelled against it all—the formal instruction of the Escuela de Bellas Artes, her father’s expectations, and her mother’s religious ideology. At 19, she eloped with fellow student Gerardo Lizárraga, and the two left for Paris. She left him soon after to pursue a bohemian lifestyle, taking up with Péret. As an adult, Varo resisted speaking about her childhood. “I do not wish to talk about myself because I hold very deeply the belief that what is important is the work, not the person,” she said.

Toward the Tower by Remedios Varo, 1961.

A triptych created in the last years of her life functions as a metaphor for her early years. In the first part, Toward the Tower (1961), Varo depicts herself as one of a group of uniformed girls bicycling away from a Mother Superior figure, an allusion to the convent she attended for primary schooling. Mother Superior is joined by a looming man and flock of birds. The girl at center resists the hypnotizing effect of her teachers, who have entranced her schoolmates. The central image of the triptych, Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961), offers an alternate view of creation at odds with her conservative Catholic upbringing, which created anxiety for Varo throughout her life. In the work, convent girls are shown captive in a tower as they embroider a story dictated by a hooded figure. The figure stirs a boiling liquid, through which the thread emerges. The final panel, The Escape (1962), represents her successful emancipation. United with her lover, they flee to the mountains.

Varo spent the majority of her life in transit, first as a child, then in adulthood as a political refugee.

Varo moved to Paris in 1937, and because of her political ties, she was barred from returning to her native Spain following the Spanish Civil War. Her time in Paris was fruitful for the connections she made: through Péret, she met leading artists such Breton, Max Ernst, Salvator Dali, and Leonora Carrington. After arriving in Paris she exhibited in the International Surrealist exhibitions organized by Breton and poet Paul Éluard. When World War II neared Paris in 1940, Varo was jailed under suspicion of espionage along with fellow Spanish expatriates. After her release she fled the country with Péret aboard one of the last ships allowed to depart the country, en route to Mexico. 

Displacement and travel is frequently alluded to in her painting, often in the form of surreal vehicles of voyage. In Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River (1959), an intense figure dressed in a bowler hat and English trench coat is ferried in a small, vest-like boat. She reaches a wooden hut, where water flows from a goblet. The work alludes to Varo’s gold mining trip to Venezuela, where the Orinoco River flows. Here, gold is reminiscent of philosopher’s gold, an alchemical substance which symbolized perfection of the mind and soul, as well as a source of transformation. 

Varo blended Renaissance and Surrealist painting techniques in her work.

In one of her best-known paintings, a juggler (or magician) transfixes a crowd of near-identical figures clad in a single gray cloak. The juggler is illuminated by white stardust, and he stands on the platform of a cart filled with  a lion and goat and fantastical instruments. Varo created the painting by first transferring a preparatory drawing onto a panel that had been primed with gesso, then scratching the panel to produce an unusual texture. Varo also used decalcomania, a decorative technique popularized by the Surrealists, in which designs on paper or aluminum foil are pressed onto another surface, transferring the image. This created the halo-like effect around the juggler. The central character has also been painted over a five-sided piece of mother of pearl, which Varo associated with enlightenment. Among her many influences was the writings of the Russian mystics and philosophers Georgii Giurdzhiev and Piotr Ouspenskii, who espoused the idea that people live their lives in a state of hypnotic “waking sleep,” but have the potential to awaken a state of hyper-consciousness. 

Psychoanalysis played a large role in Varo’s work. 

Like many of the Surrealists, Varo was drawn to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, both of whom focused on the complexity of the unconscious and untapped desires. It’s unknown whether Varo ever saw a psychoanalyst (a few unsent letters seeking psychiatric help were discovered in her belongings), but she populated her paintings with overt references to the field of study. In the 1956 work Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst’s Office, the central figure exits from the office of Dr. F. J. A. (Freud, Jung, and the Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler) and proceeds to drop her father’s disembodied head into a small well, an act which she described as “correct to do when leaving the psychoanalysis office.” Looked at one way, this could be Varo liberating herself from the patriarchy and approaching autonomy.  

She found success and an enduring artistic practice in Mexico City.

Her early exposure to Surrealist and Cubist artists, in particular the work of Georges Braque, were formative on her later practice, but Varo produced little work while in Paris. This was partly due to the sexism of Varo’s male peers, who she said held contemptuous attitudes toward women artists. In Mexico, however, she produced a lush body of work that often elevated a feminine figure. In The Call (1961), her body is illuminated from within by a supernatural glow. While working odd jobs, including a stint as Marc Chagall’s assistant, Varo reunited with fellow European expatriates, such as Leonora Carrington and photographer Kati Horna, who together became known as “the three witches.”

Upon Varo’s arrival, Mexican muralism still held sway, but by the time of Varo’s first exhibition in 1955, Surrealism had become a market force. The show was a hit, with buyers forced to add their names to a waitlist. She showed again at the Salón de la Arte de Mujer in 1958, and died of a heart attack five years later, in 1963.

After a period of relative obscurity outside Mexico, Varo’s star rises on the market.

Frida Kahlo, Varo, and Carrington are often considered the preeminent women artists associated with the Mexican Surrealist movement. Varo remained relatively unknown outside Mexico after her death, but her profile has steadily climbed in recent years alongside rising demand for female Surrealists. Varo, having passed away at her prime, behind few works, many of which reside in private collections. In 2012, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired The Juggler (The Magician), 1956, which is now prominently displayed in the Surrealist gallery beside works by Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.

In 2019, Varo was featured in  “Surrealism in Mexico,” a retrospective at the Di Donna Galleries in New York, and in a pop-up show presented by Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco, which paired Varo with works by Carrington. “Some of the best paintings of Surrealism were made in Mexico during the 1940s and ’50s, by women,” wrote the New York Times in its review of the show. In June 2020, Varo’s 1959 canvas Microcosmos (Determinismo) sold at Sotheby’s for $1.8 million, marking the fifth-highest price paid for the Varo’s work at auction. Armonía (Autorretrato Sugerente), 1956, achieved an even higher number, selling for a record-breaking $6.1 million, far surpassing its high estimate of $3 million.