Image: Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires
The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA) will present ‘Recetario de sueños. La amistad y el arte de Remedios Varo y Leonora Carrington’, a two-session course examining the relationship, artistic practices and spiritual interests of the two artists. Led by María Laura Rosa, the programme will take place on 27 August and 3 September 2026 from 6pm to 8pm at the MALBA Library, with online access provided through the museum’s Malba Plus platform.
The course is part of MALBA’s 2026 public-programmes schedule and is announced as both in-person and virtual. The museum’s webpage states that in-person places are already full. Each class will be made available online 48 hours after the corresponding session, and the recordings will remain accessible for 30 days after the course concludes.
The programme focuses on a friendship that developed after Varo and Carrington went into exile in Mexico during the Second World War. According to MALBA, Mexico provided a setting in which both artists could develop creative universes shaped by esotericism and ancestral knowledge. Associated with Surrealism, they produced imaginative ‘recipes’ involving erotic dreams, cures for insomnia and the invocation of extraordinary beings from nature—forms that combined humour with mystery.
The first class, titled ‘El viaje trascendente’, will centre on Remedios Varo’s life and work. It will consider how the artist’s travels brought her into contact with people—including Carrington—with whom she exchanged knowledge that later appeared in her art. The second, ‘Lo extraordinario que habita en lo doméstico. Pócimas creativas de Leonora Carrington’, will turn to Carrington’s life and spiritual investigations, including the shared interest in magical dimensions of reality that the artists pursued in Mexico.
Across the two meetings, Rosa will address the artists’ biographies, painting techniques, spiritual searches and studies of alchemy and tarot. MALBA describes these interests as helping Varo and Carrington expand Surrealism beyond the study of the unconscious and psychoanalysis. Their work, the museum says, proposes a hidden connection among the things of the Earth and opens onto worlds that challenge habitual logic.
The course’s instructor, María Laura Rosa, is a doctor of contemporary art and a researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). Her research focuses on feminist art in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico from the 1970s onward. She has written books including ‘De cuerpo entero. Debates feministas y ámbito cultural en Argentina 1960-1980’ and ‘Ilse Fusková. La libertad de caminar sola’, and has curated exhibitions in Argentina and Mexico. MALBA also notes that its collection contains key works by both Varo and Carrington. The event page identifies the accompanying image as Leonora Carrington’s ‘Las distracciones de Dagoberto’ (1945), from the Eduardo F. Costantini Collection.
