Named Remedios, meaning remedy, to heal her parents’ grief over a dead sister, and later shaving five years off her own age to fit a male-dominated art world, this painter built one of the most precisely engineered imaginations of the twentieth century. This episode traces Remedios Varo from a Catholic convent school and her hydraulic engineer father’s mechanical diagrams to the Madrid academy, the bohemian cafes of 1930s Barcelona, and the surrealist circle of Paris.

We follow her through the Spanish Civil War, poverty so severe she forged de Chirico paintings for food, imprisonment in France, a documentary screening in which she spotted her estranged husband in an internment camp and bribed his way out, escape via Varian Fry’s rescue committee, and arrival in Mexico City in 1941. There, alongside Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna, she studied mystics, mocked pompous followers, illustrated mosquitoes for a malaria campaign in Venezuela, and finally, after marrying Walter Gruen in 1952, built the luminous universe of alchemists, cats, and cosmic machinery that made her a master.

• How a convent’s mysticism and an engineer’s blueprints wired a single mind for both magic and precision
• Exquisite corpse games, an open marriage, and the Barcelona avant-garde before war shattered everything
• Art forgery in Paris, prison trauma she never discussed, and the Serpa Pinto voyage out of Casablanca
• The Three Witches of Mexico City and their pursuit of four-dimensional painting as rebellion against the surrealist male gaze
• Quartz-scratched gesso, decalcomania, hand-cooked varnish, and the 1955 Galeria Diana show that sold out before her death in 1963