Caitlin Haskell News Today

We asked our staff and contributors to look back on a year in art around the world, from major museum shows to unexpected gems in alternative spaces.

Here’s our list of the best recently published art books for holiday giving.

With this exhibition, the Art Institute builds on its institutional commitments to collecting, exhibiting, and contributing to the research on Surrealist work. It also reaffirms the museum’s commitments to recent vital collaborations with Mexican art institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.

“In Varo’s work there is often a sense of geographic travel, but also a sense of traveling down material pathways that no one has ever looked at before,” says curator Caitlin Haskell.

While Varo's work does feature many female protagonists, her sex is not the primary factor in her significance as an artist.

The introduction to this catalogue of this perfectly amazing painter-writer-scientist, a poet in everything she undertook, is entitled “Spirit, Matter, Story, Soul” and so says it all.

Varo, the star of a new Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, created fantastical scenes that explored mystical realms and higher states of consciousness.

This is the first solo show dedicated to her work in the United States since 2000.

Varo, the star of a new Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, created fantastical scenes that explored mystical realms and higher states of consciousness.

Varo, the star of a new Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, created fantastical scenes that explored mystical realms and higher states of consciousness.