Maruja Mallo, another face of surrealism

Santander (Spain). “While everywhere we celebrate the surrealists, it seemed to us a duty to bring our stone too to the building”, said Manuel Segade during the inauguration of the exhibition “Maruja Mallo: mask and compass. Paintings and drawings from 1924 to 1982 ”at the Botín Center. The director of the Reina-Sofía museum evokes the many events organized in 2024 to celebrate the centenary of the movement. And he says it clearly: Spanish artists were too little in the game. A wrong that the museums of Madrid and Santander wanted to repair by co-producing this retrospective devoted to a figure still unknown across Iberian borders: Maruja Mallo (1902-1995).

Born at the very beginning of the last century, Madrid is often described as an avant-garde. If his style is not frankly revolutionary, he can be described as “resolutely modern”. The artist innovates especially in the choice of his models, representing women with androgynous traits or black figures, in reverse of the dominant Western canons of the time.

The exhibition, chronologically hung, reflects all the singularity of Mallo and plunges the visitor into his personal and artistic history, made of travel and audacity. A course that led her for example to integrate in the 1920s the generation of 27-it will be one of the only female figures-, this avant-garde group composed in particular of Dalí and Buñuel.

Marxism and bouquets

In the 1930s, the arrival of Francoism pushed her to exile: the intrepid Maruja Mallo left for Argentina, where she resided twenty-five years. As in Spain, she is there, an immediate success. Her modern themes appeal to New York where she exhibits regularly.

In his South American paintings, the Marxist consciousness of that which flees the dictatorship is obvious. She paints women with hands as large as their face, cut with sharp brushstrokes, carrying the ear of wheat and the fishing net like others exhibit the hammer and the sickle: her series “The religion of work” (1936-1937) is one of the most successful. In the 1940s, she explores further life. But can we really qualify in this way his “Naturalezas Vivas” (1942-1943) inspired by his Argentine environment, shimmering ocean bouquets which fit perfectly into the marine setting of the Botín Center?

Back in Spain during the following decade, Maruja Mallo finds the Madrid review who had made her known in her youth, Revisted from West, And becomes the main contrigence.

The exhibition thus testifies, through original copies, television extracts and press brochures, the commitment of the artist, who will not cease to communicate on his practice, inspiring his contemporaries as the young generations.