Maruja Mallo. Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings
Presentation of the book
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on the last working day before the activity. A maximum of 2 per person. Doors open 30 minutes before the activity
Maruja Mallo (Viveiro, Lugo, 1902 – Madrid, 1995) is considered a key artist in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. A representative of the Generation of ’27, Surrealism and the poetics of exile, Mallo possessed an exceptional understanding of popular culture and uniquely represented feminism in early avant-garde movements.
This encounter presents the catalogue raisonnée of oil paintings from her artistic practice as a whole and brings together many of the foremost specialists to have worked on her output, such as Estrella de Diego and Guillermo de Osma all of whom have contributed to the publication, along with Juan Pérez de Ayala, Antonio Gómez Conde, Antonio Bonet Correa, Fernando Huici March and José Carlos Valle.
The volume is the culmination of work spanning almost two decades, starting in 2002 when art historians Guillermo de Osma and Juan Pérez de Ayala began cataloguing works. In 2016, after receiving the Art and Patronage Foundation award from the Guillermo de Osma gallery, the project was able to continue, while support from the painter’s family, which granted access to the artist’s family and personal archive, has been pivotal to developing the classification and allocation of the body of work.
The catalogue raisonné establishes Maruja Mallo’s pictorial work in 147 paintings and 40 sketches, including unseen works, constituting the first essential corpus devoted to her work. Despite Mallo representing one of the brightest periods in twentieth-century Spanish culture, a long shadow still hangs over her — after her twenty-five-year exile because of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism — which this publication has been instrumental in lifting.
Participants
Ladislao Azcona, president of Fundación Azcona, a non-profit organisation that has sponsored and published catalogue raisonnés on major figures from Spanish twentieth-century art, such as Martín Chirino, Manolo Millares, Manuel Rivera, Luis Fernández and Julio González.
Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía.
Estrella de Diego, art historian. She is a lecturer at the Complutense University of Madrid and an academic at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts, and notable among her countless publications in this field is Maruja Mallo (Mapfre, 2008).
María Escribano, art historian and art critic who has curated exhibitions such as The Schizos of Madrid, with Iván López Munuera (Museo Reina Sofía, 2009), and written essays on Maruja Mallo (Maruja Mallo, Centro gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, 1993).
Ángeles González-Sinde, president of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Board of Trustees.
Guillermo de Osma, art historian and gallerist. In 1990 in Madrid he founded the Guillermo de Osma gallery, which specialises in historical avant-gardes in both Europe and Latin America. He also chairs the Arte Madrid association. Notable among his publications is Óscar Domínguez (Caja de Ahorros and Monte de Piedad de Navarra, 2003), and, with Juan Pérez de Ayala, he curated La pintura del 27 (Galería Guillermo de Osma, 2005).