A major exponent of figurative Surrealism in Spain, Maruja Mallo trained at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, alongside artists such as Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), a lynchpin in the Surrealist movement.

Throughout her career, Mallo’s practice evolved from an energetic Surrealism expressed through variegated and colourful compositions, towards a more pessimistic view of humans and life, which reached its peak in the 1930s. At that time, a scholarship from the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios allowed her to travel to Paris, where she met Joan Miró (1893-1983) and André Breton, the father of Surrealism. After returning to Spain, the Civil War broke out and she went into exile to Buenos Aires. A reencounter with nature there led to a formal and conceptual shift in her practice: though preserving an overall Surrealist atmosphere, her works were now more classically inflected, formally and aesthetically speaking.

In the 1960s the artist returned to Spain. Later, her figure would be recovered by the Movida, the irreverent 1980s cultural movement in Madrid. These years proved to be very prolific for the artist as Mallo began to explore contemporary materials and techniques with highly innovative results. In the aesthetic of her new works, she incorporated more modern motifs, like planets and spaceships.

In 1983 Maruja Mallo was commissioned with this drawing Ecos Andinos (Andean Echoes) from the BBVA Collection to illustrate the poster for an exhibition Banco Exterior was organising as a tribute to Pablo Neruda on the tenth anniversary of his death. It represents an Araucanian Indian riding a llama which is carrying musical instruments—a drum, a guitar, a quena and a pan flute—as it flies over the Andes.

This depiction of popular elements as the essence of the country harks back to her own Verbenas, prior to Surrealism, works full of a joie de vivre that is peopled here with a new exotic iconography. The composition shows an evident harmony and balance between form, colour and matter.

Written on the back of the paper is the inscription that gives the piece its title: Ecos andinos / levitando / sobre los Andes / vence las leyes de la gravedad. The drawing was inspired by Neruda’s words: “…faced by the Andean giant we levitate over the Aconcagua only to find ourselves in front of the vast, fascinating desert of water of the Pacific...”.

In its time the work was the subject of some controversy, with Mallo being accused of plagiarism by the Chilean painter Jorge Salas (1946) who had made a record cover in 1976 for a Chilean band with motifs virtually identical to those used in the poster.