With Maruja Mallo: Mask and Compass, Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía celebrates one of the boldest and most poetic voices of the Spanish avant-garde. Born in Viveiro, Galicia, Maruja Mallo (1902–1995) was far more than a painter – she was a thinker, a rebel, a visionary, and one of the first women in Spain to anchor a modern, self-determined female image in art.
More than one hundred paintings, around seventy drawings, and numerous photographs, letters and documents – many shown publicly for the first time – unfold across eleven rooms to reveal the multifaceted world of this remarkable artist. From the vibrant Verbenas of the 1920s, capturing urban Madrid between popular festivity and social satire, through her surrealist and geometric compositions, to the cosmic visions created during her exile in Latin America, the exhibition traces an unending quest for balance – between intellect and emotion, nature and structure, body and spirit.
The title Mask and Compass encapsulates this duality perfectly: the mask stands for what is hidden, performative and self-invented, while the compass evokes rationality, geometry and direction. Together they form Mallo’s artistic cosmos – disciplined and wild, mathematical and magical at once.
A close friend of Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, and Luis Buñuel, Mallo pushed early against the boundaries separating art, science and philosophy. In the 1930s, shaped by the spirit of Spain’s Second Republic, she fused social engagement with formal rigor. Exiled to Latin America, she discovered new sources of inspiration – lush nature, mythology and light – creating series such as Naturalezas vivas (Living Nature), in which bodies, plants and marine forms become metaphors for feminine energy and cosmic harmony.
From her earliest works, Mallo explored the image of the modern woman – active, independent, and self-assured. She embodied this new femininity herself, presenting not the passive muse but the conscious, creative subject. Self-representation became central to her art, inseparable from her creative thinking.
As a photographer, Mallo used the camera to question and construct identity – always performative, theatrical, almost cinematic. In a famous 1929 photograph she poses inside an abandoned train carriage, a symbol of movement and transition; in 1945 she appears on a Chilean beach as a sea goddess draped in algae – a vision of myth and self-assertion. In later portraits and press images she continued to incorporate symbolic props: a map, a compass, butterflies – emblems of orientation, transformation and freedom.
Maruja Mallo: Mask and Compass is more than a retrospective – it is a rediscovery. An invitation to encounter a woman who understood early on that art could be stage, laboratory and mirror all at once. Her work celebrates life in all its complexity and beauty – and reminds us that freedom itself is an act of creation.
Maruja Mallo: Mask and Compass
8 October 2025 – 16 March 2026
Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Floor 1, Madrid
Organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Fundación Botín, curated by Patricia Molins