Graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1958, Vari was at first a painter. After marrying the renowned Colombian artist Fernando Botero in 1978, Vari developed a passion for pre-Columbian art, especially the stylised lines of Olmec sculpture. Her later work reflects the spare rounded forms that suggest the human body, and the visual language she developed charge her pieces with a particular dynamism that can make the forms appear to move and shift as the viewer walks around them.