Santander,
This year, thirty since Madrid Maruja Mallo died, the artist who from the residence of Students of Madrid participated in the first Spanish surrealism and the generation of 27, combined in his work the popular celebrations with esoteric touches, a dynamic imprint and obvious modernity; It was widely recognized in America (where it resided from 1937 to the sixties) and triumphantly returned to Madrid turned into an artist, and character, legendary.
In collaboration with the Reina Sofía Museum, where it will travel in October, the Botín Center has opened today “Maruja Mallo: mask and compass. Paints and drawings from 1924 to 1982”, which is its greatest retrospective so far, which has been curatored by Patricia Molins, a member of the MNCARS Temporary Exhibition Department. There is the anthology of ninety paintings and a selection of works dated between the mid -twentie Politics. The most recent interpretations of his legacy have wanted to find in him the reflection of the concerns of his time and also the anticipation of some later, in relation to the universal nature of certain human concerns, racial and economic inequalities, the claim of women, the ability of art to detect invisible layers of reality or the preservation of nature; They also emphasize this proposal and thus acquire a certain visionary role.
The tour begins with its passage through the Royal Academy of San Fernando, where in addition to meeting the cartoonist of Tebeos Francis Bartolozzi, he strengthened ties with Dalí. Among their teachers were Chicharro or Romero de Torres, who left their mark on their early creations; Another of her referents, for her and for several artists of her generation, was the book Magic realism of Franz Roh, published in 1925, for making known an alternative language for realism that would renew it in time of preeminence of cubism and abstraction: it might not house narration and sprout of the popular. Two of those initial paintings of the twenties have come to Santander, from the Lugo Provincial Museum (Indigenous and Lady portrait with fan), that point to their interest, from the beginning, for the representation of contemporary women and remote cultures.
1927 would be an important year for her: she moved to the Canary Islands, whose landscape would be a discovery; He began to turn the woman into the axis of her paintings, not as a muse but as a subject; And he presented his first exhibition in Madrid, at the offices of the Western Magazinereceiving praises from Ortega y Gasset. In that year and in the next one he carried out one of his most widespread compositions, The verbenasin which he began to show his own position in the debate, managed by the aforementioned generation of 27, about the relations between popular culture and the art of his time, between traditions and modernity. The structure of the image, geometric with a symbolic sense, nourishes the relationships between the figures and the decorations of the pearns and the treatment in the cinema of simultaneity and superposition; It collects diverse types portrayed from the ciza: women dressed as black angels, kings and magistrates of stone cardboard, bulls and manolas composing small theaters, and intellectuals uploaded in pigs that pull a guyvive that leads them to worlds beyond, such as China or the pyramids.
It will not be the only verbena in the loot: this exhibition is the first to gather its five scenes of this type since that sample in the Western Magazine; two of them (The magician/pim pam pum, that will arrive in a few weeks, and Kermesse) come from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Center Pompidou.
They clearly contrast with their compositions of the thirties, in which he worked after suffering a serious traffic accident and a stormy break with Rafael Alberti, and letting themselves be influenced by the aesthetics of the Vallecas School and Benjamín Palencia. We can contemplate Sewers and bells (1930-1932), in which the human figure appears only through its waste or fingerprints and becomes important, above all, textures and matter; Earth and excrement (1932), of similar bases; either The scarecrow (1930), which offers a necrological vision of nature from a surrealist approach.
Between 1931 and 1933 he lived in Paris, thanks to a scholarship destined to be formed in scenographies. There he met Picasso already looked, and began to investigate about the possibilities of space as a three -dimensional support of the work instead of the pictorial plane (these inquiries would materialize in the scenography of Clavileñoa ballet by Rodolfo Halffter that did not appear at the Student Residence because of the Civil War). Upon his return to Spain he carried out works such as Mineral and plant architectures (1933), reducing the figures to anatomical lines or sections and applying the subject according to very marked textures, wanting to break the dichotomy between figure and background; either Rural architectures (1933-1935), in which he drew skeletons or housings of silos, almiares and other constructions used for cereal harvest, playing with the dichotomy between the animated and the inanimate. The matter was also very relevant here, but it was submitted to geometry, a process that would have its culminating point in the ceramics, in which the Earth acquires at the same time a constructive and non -destructive value, as in that series of Sewers and bells.
1937 was the year he took for America, first to Argentina, and in which the series began THE RELIGION OF WORK (1937-1939), in which archaic images of goddesses or bidders, with the face framed by spikes or networks. He undertook with them a stage that he called “Renaissance”, a new classicism in which to develop his vision of art as salvation against time and war destruction. He referred to this set as born of his “materialistic faith in the triumph of the fish, in the reign of the spike”; With them they get together and intertwine human hands. From this moment we appreciate in Mallo the appeal to a low light source that laterally affects the figures, the beginning of the beginning or the end of the day.
In the forties it would be used in Living natures (1941-1943), which refer to female, sensual and colorist figures, inserted in compositions that, by their shells and flowers, allude to the animal and vegetable kingdom as a metaphor of the human body. From now on, he would seek to incorporate in his creations the fourth dimension attending to the findings of physics of that time, which abandoned the static conception of space in favor of a dynamic of space-time. In paintings like LIVING NATURE II (1941-1942) or LIVING NATURE XII (1943), marine elements crossed by vegetables offer a sexualized and organic appearance.
In Latin America, and especially in Brazil, Mallo knew landscapes and populations whose physical variety and its cultural and racial syncretism led to its work. From this moment, it was proposed to devise a systematic method of representing a new humanity, partly in response to racism and nationalism of the thirties: he wanted to capture spaces and circular times, at the same time present and eternal, in which heads, masks and acrobats of symbolic and idealized forms, manifestation of his belief in art as a perfect vision of the real and open to the future. Deployed static heads in which he rehearses the fusion between races, between races and animals, and between sexes, as in The human deer (1948) or in Gold (1952). Their Masks Of those years, in which positive and negative emotions converge, they are also debtor, of the studies on Freud that Mallo began in that period.
In 1962 he returns to Spain, where he would definitely settle three years later, and perform his latest series: Vacuum inhabitants and Ether travelerslinked to real or imaginary trips, crossing the Andes or crossing the Pacific, which he had interpreted as levitational experiences in which he would have contacted suprahuman dimensions. In part, their infinite sidereal spaces would arise from them, in which circular forms give way to serpenting and complex geometries and the figures become beings subject to symbiotic or metamorphic processes that correspond to the complete evolutionary process, from the cell to space machines through animals.
The exhibition ends with the works he created during his last years, recovering reasons for his different eras and capturing them with symbolic tones (ranges of blue, red and yellow); also with vignettes that I had made for the covers of the aforementioned Western Magazine and with a series of engravings of the seventies, photographs and audiovisuals.
“Maruja Mallo: mask and compass”
Botín Center
Emilio Botín Square, s/n
Pereda gardens
Santander
From April 12 to September 14, 2025
