Maruja Mallo at her estudio, Madrid 1936. © Maruja Mallo, VEGAP, Santander, 2024

When in 1979 Paloma Chamorro interviewed Maruja Mallo, clearly the scandalous elderly woman was still the youngster who had ridden into church on a bicycle and walked across Madrid hatless. And as the Botín Centre’s retrospective on her work highlights, her painting never lost an iota of that irreverence: realistic at first, geometrized towards the end, but ever charged with life and symbolism. For, as her beloved Lorca told her, “between fiesta and scarecrow, all the beauty of the world fits within the eye.”

© Botín Centre