From Her Own Time, Maruja Mallo Was Already Speaking To Ours

Maruja Mallo’s singular style defied Surrealism, Francoism, and the patriarchy alike. Her current retrospective at Centro Botín redefines the Spanish artist as a scientific socialist, feminist, and visual pioneer — unmistakably modern and decades ahead of her time.

If you walk up the steep metal staircase to the second floor of Centro Botín in Santander, Spain, pausing briefly to gaze at the tranquil bay — its colour changing from sea-foam green to delicate blue to gunmetal grey — turn right and enter the gallery. There, you will find a black-and-white photograph of a woman. She wears a frilly white blouse and a checked scarf knotted around her neck, her hair cut short in a pixie style that looks as though it has just begun to grow out. Around her are paintings and sculptures of her own making: to her right, a portrait of a woman from whose hand sprout three stalks of wheat; to her left, an image of a Spanish bullfighter. These are not realist works, nor are they surrealist, despite what many critics have claimed. This is a style, a way of seeing, that is entirely her own. The artist, Maruja Mallo, smiles in the photograph. She spent her life defying the categories imposed on her art. Unmistakably modern and ahead of her time, she is now the subject of a retrospective at the Centro Botín, Mask and Compass.

The photograph was taken in 1936 in Mallo’s studio, the year the Spanish Civil War began. It offers insight not only into her life and work but into the political and scientific ideas underpinning her art. Much of the work around her features small, circular forms. “Mallo believed that artists must teach others to view the cosmos through the lens of contemporary science,” explains Patricia Molins, the exhibition’s curator. “It’s why she favoured circles: she saw the order governing the universe and its transformations as already implicit in the form of the cell.” Her portrait, Sorpresa del Trigo (“Wheat Surprise”), enlarges the human body: the female subject holds three seeds in one palm and sprouts wheat from the other hand. It expresses the artist’s scientific socialism, celebrating human labour and the labourer as an act of rebellion against bourgeois, Catholic Spain, against Franco, and against the conservatism of her upbringing.

The “mask” in the exhibition’s title refers to the masquerade of carnival, which Mallo saw as an intrinsically democratic space where Spain’s hierarchies temporarily dissolved and re-formed in plain sight. In the first room, several of her colourful carnival scenes outrageously gather every facet of Spanish society — priests, jesters, the poor, the rich — into vivid, teeming tableaux that invite the eye to roam hungrily over their detail. Her ideals were far from the conservatism later enforced in Franco’s Spain. In 1937, Mallo fled to Buenos Aires, where she remained in exile for twenty-five years before returning to Spain in 1965. This rupture — one of the most significant events of her life — divides the exhibition into a “before” and “after,” showing how biography shaped her renegade output, and how she resisted the dominant trends of her time to pioneer a style uniquely her own.

Born in 1902 in Viveiro, Galicia, to a well-to-do family, Mallo was one of several children; often left to her own devices, her idle time was spent drawing and painting. In 1922, she moved with her family to Madrid and was accepted into the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Spain’s most prestigious classical art institution. The city was undergoing a cultural renaissance. It lacked the grandeur of Paris or the licentiousness of Weimar-era Berlin, but it offered the young artist the chance to connect with many of modern art’s luminaries. Salvador Dalí had recently arrived from Catalonia and became a friend, and she met filmmaker Luis Buñuel and poet Federico García Lorca at the all-male student residence where they lived. Mallo was part of the Generation of 1927, an influential group of poets and artists united by a desire to work in avant-garde forms.

But she was unwilling to be a side-character in the male-dominated Surrealist avant-garde. The Centro Botín exhibition is alive to her determination to escape the constraints of her gender and to forge a more emancipatory artistic practice. For Mallo, this meant conceiving of her art as a cosmos, interweaving science and mythology. Her paintings are often more interested in morphology, the form of things, than in the things themselves. Later works feature hybrid beings with both masculine and feminine traits: large masculine torsos with breasts, exaggeratedly muscular calves and shins, often dancing or leaping. In others, as in Mask 320, geometric shapes are layered and differentiated by colour, unmoored from any natural object. Earlier mask paintings were recognisably masks, but with fantastical, androgynous figures moving at their edges; such later ones dissolve the object altogether into abstraction.

Mallo continued to make work and appear on Spanish television until her death in 1992. Her long career, spanning much of the 20th century, is presented here as a sustained refusal of social and artistic conservatism. The impetus behind Mask and Compass is to return her to the conversation of the century’s major artists, an act of reclamation that also makes clear how far ahead she was of many of her peers. One series of shell paintings — Naturelza Viva XII among them — resonates uncannily with work seen recently in contemporary biennales, where artists continue to draw on the organism as a potent ecological symbol. It is as if, from her own time, Mallo was already speaking to ours.

Written by Gazelle Mba