Maruja Mallo

(Vivero, Lugo, 1902 – Madrid, 1995)

Lips and athletes

ca. 1950

Charcoal and coloured pencils on paper

32.50 x 48.00 cm

Inv. no. 36007

BBVA Collection Spain


ACAC. BBVA Collection (on deposit at Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid)

Maruja Mallo is one of the maximum exponents of figurative surrealism in Spain. She studied at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where she coincided with seminal artists in the surrealist movement like Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).

As her career developed, her work gradually evolved from an energetic surrealism, with crowded compositions and heightened colouring, towards a more pessimistic vision of man and life, which reached its peak during the 1930s. Thanks to a scholarship from Junta de Ampliación de Estudios (Committee for Extension of Studies and Scientific Research), during this period she travelled to Paris, where she met Joan Miró (1893-1983) and André Breton, the father of surrealism. On returning to Spain, the outbreak of the Civil War forced her into exile and she settled in Buenos Aires, where she remained until 1962. There she reconnected with nature, and this experience was to bring about a formal and conceptual shift in her work, which, from then on, would show the influence of classical formality and aesthetics while still preserving a surrealist atmosphere.

This is the case of the work at hand, belonging to the BBVA Collection, Lips and Athletes, made in the 1950s. Mallo held onto many drawings of this kind, which were probably from her notepads, because of their evident interest and quality. They grant us access to deeper insights into her creative process and lay the theoretical and visual foundations of her painting, which can be summed up as the mathematical search for visual order. And this is unquestionably what gives her figures such a classical and rigorous presence.

This kind of human forms could already be discerned in one of the murals the artist painted in 1945 for the Los Ángeles cinema in Buenos Aires, designed by the architects Abel López Chas and Federico J. Zemborain, who commissioned her with the mural decoration because, in their view, Mallo represented “a token of the possibility of a happy and healthy world.” The artist from Galicia made three no-longer-existing large murals, initially conceived to go on permanent exhibit. Armonía plástica was her last large-format work in South America before returning to Spain.

Worth underscoring is the fact that the substantial number of existing preparatory drawings and studies of the human figure evinces Mallo’s interest in the analysis of movement, proportions, geometry, shadows and their intensities. At once, they also illustrate her iconographical repertoire of choice: spaces populated with athletes and masks. Taken together they evince her meticulous approach to realizing her works, without reneging on the energy which characterized her practice throughout her whole career.