THE REINA SOFÍA STRENGTHENS THE FIGURE OF MARUJA MALLO

The Museo Reina Sofía is hosting until mid-next month the exhibition Máscara y compás, an extensive retrospective devoted to Maruja Mallo (Vivero, Spain, 1902–Madrid, Spain, 1995), which spans all stages of the surrealist artist’s career and highlights her role as a leading figure of the Generation of ’27. Organized by the museum itself together with the Botín Foundation of Santander, the exhibition arrives in Madrid in its second iteration, after being shown between April and September at the Santander institution.

Beyond offering a detailed survey of her artistic production that positions her as one of the foremost references of avant-garde art in Spain, the exhibition places particular emphasis on the period of the artist’s exile, a time marked by intense ties to Latin America. This vital phase represented a turning point in her work, during which she absorbed newly discovered cultural and symbolic landscapes.

From her time—above all—in Argentina and Uruguay, Mallo developed a keen capacity for curiosity and for assimilating different environments, both socially and anthropologically. This allowed her to advance toward the creation of new artistic languages and to expand her pictorial universe, developments that can be seen in series such as Marina and Terrestre, Las Máscaras, and Naturalezas vivas, which also incorporate elements from the imagery of her travels.

Her Latin American production emphasizes these connections between cosmogonic elements and results in a body of work that fuses the foundations of European avant-garde art with an exploration and acceptance of American reality, making it one of the richest stages of Maruja Mallo’s artistic trajectory.

Maruja Mallo. Máscara y compás can be seen until March 16, 2026, at the Museo Reina Sofía, Santa Isabel, 52, Madrid (Spain).