Maruja Mallo
Maruja Mallo (born Ana María Gómez González; 5 January 1902 – 6 February 1995) was a Spanish surrealist painter. She is considered an artist of the Generation of 1927 within the Spanish avant-garde movement. Biography Mallo was the fourth daughter of fourteen children born to Justo Gómez Mallo (Customs Corps Official and native of Madrid) and María del Pilar González Lorenzo, born in Viveiro, Spain, on 5 January 1902. She is the older sister of sculptor Cristino Mallo (born in Tui in 1905). Early years When she was a young girl, Mallo would alternate between living with parents and her aunt (Juliana Lastres Carrer) and uncle (Ramiro Gonzalez Lorenzo). While living with her aunt and uncle at a young age, she felt inspired to create and express herself through artwork. After the birth of one of her brothers, the family moved to Avilés, where they remained from 1913 to 1922. In 1922 at age 20, Mallo's family moved to Madrid. There, she began to study at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where she stayed until 1926. ^2. In Madrid she met artists, writers, and scientists from the Spanish Generation ’27 like Salvador Dalí, Concha Méndez, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Gregorio Prieto, Federico García Lorca, Margarita Manso, Luis Buñuel, María Zambrano, and Rafael Alberti, with whom she maintained a relationship until he met María Teresa León. She went on to form a group of women from the Generation of ’27 known as “Las Sinsombrero” (English: those without hats). In particular, she was friends with Concha Méndez and Josefina Canarias. During the 1920s, Mallo also worked on numerous literary publications and produced several books. Author Ortega y Gasset recognized her paintings in 1928 and organized her first exhibit in Revista de Occidente, which was very successful, praised for its originality and freshness. It displayed ten oil paintings representing towns full of sun, bullfighters and women from Madrid, as well as colored prints of machinery, sports, and cinema from the beginning of the century. The exhibit was a starting point from which Mallo was judged for her work and not her gender. During this time, Mallo's paintings followed the theme of new objectivity or magic realism, theorized by Franz Roh in his book Magic Realism in 1925. According to biographer Shirley Mangini, "Although historians of Spanish avant-garde art locate the origins of the movement in the activities of Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, and another student at the Residencia, José Bello, Mallo's artistic vision was an important catalyst in the Spanish avant-garde movement." Her paintings of the 1920s represent urban entertainments and sports, composed in complex overlapping arrangements that express the dynamism of modern life. These works, such as La Verbena (The Festival) of 1927, combine sharply defined, smoothly modeled forms with bright colors. The 1930s and the Second Spanish Republic Mallo's work became more surrealistic in the early 1930s, including geometric visual language and themes that ranged from fruits to agricultural structures as well as creating ceramic disks