Tuesday 29 October at 18:00 (UK time). Estrella de Diego, ‘Why Are Women Painters So Often Surrealist? The Case of Maruja Mallo’.

In February 1937, the Spanish Civil War in full swing, Maruja Mallo had left for Buenos Aires on the excuse of an invitation from the city’s Friends of Art Association to give some lectures there. The Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, an ambassador in Lisbon, would provide Mallo with the safe conduct she needed to ship out of a Spain that was up in flames. In the Argentine capital, Mallo developed all of the artistic skills that had germinated in her work in 1920s Madrid. There, along with Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, she had formed part of a remarkable group at the Residencia de Estudiantes, a progressive centre in Madrid, among the most creative cities in the country during the 1920s. Before leaving Europe, Mallo had held her first individual exhibition, mentored by the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, in 1928 in the exhibition rooms of the prestigious journal Revista de Occidente. The works on display were a hymn to modern cities and their storefronts, their verbenas or street parties. Shortly after her exhibition in Revista de Occidente, in 1932 Mallo displayed what are, perhaps, the most ‘surrealist’ of her works—the series Cloacas y campanarios (Drains and Bell Towers)—at the Pierre Gallery in Paris. There she met Breton, who would buy some of her works, as evidenced when the writer’s collection went up for auction.

In any case, that detail could not be considered enough to define Mallo as a ‘surrealist’ painter. Or at least not only a surrealist painter. A great majority of her works show a perfect domain of geometry, those skills she learnt during the sessions with the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García when he decided to settle in Madrid, and around him there orbited a small, exquisite circle of constructive artists that included Mallo.

Why is Mallo then called a ‘surrealist’ painter? Why are so many avant-garde women called ‘surrealist’ alone? Can a woman be less figurative, more geometrical? Why did Malo call herself ‘surrealist’ many years later, the rest of her production? Taking cosmopolitan Mallo as a starting point, the presentation will discuss some of the problems associated to naming and classifying women artists by history of art and the way they often masquerade to conform narrative.

Estrella de Diego is a writer, professor, and academician currently living in Madrid. She has held the KJCC Chair of Spanish Culture and Civilization at NYU, the 13th Luis Angel Arango Internacional Chair at the Banco de la República in Bogotá, and has been awarded the Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Professorship (Iowa Universiy). She is a Member of the Board of the Prado Museum and the Gala Salvador Museum in Figueres. She is widely published author in both fiction and non-fiction and a prolific curator. Her research has mainly focused on Gender Studies and the construction of Modernity. She has curated the show Otros Surrealismos (Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, 2025) and she has extensively written about Maruja Mallo (among other publications the book Maruja Mallo—Fundación Mapfre, 2008). She is currently writing a book on Maruja Mallo.