Maruja Mallo (1902-1995) Galician painter

Maruja Mallo by Tamara De Lempicka

Maruja Mallo, Desnudo en la playa

Maruja Mallo

"Surrealism always existed, like the original on- sea celled creature, like an anthropological secret.
Absent from physical vision, it must be viewed with eyes closed. And I with my pencil ready under the pillow I  never use, awken with my brain in my hand." Maruja Mallo in Penelope Rosemont (ed), Surrealist Women, (University of Texas, Austin, 1998), p. 73.

Maruja Mallo, Naturaleza Viva, oil on canvas, (1943)

Nature is what began to attract me: I want to discover a new pattern. This pattern is the intimate architecture of nature and humankind, the living mathematics  of the skeleton.

In nature - clairvoyant and mysterious, spontaneous and structured - devoid of anachronistic ghosts, I analyse the structure of minerals and vegetables, the diversity of crystalline and biological forms synthetized in numerical and geometric patterns, in a living universal order. 

Maruja Mallo in Penelope Rosemont (ed), Surrealist Women,  An International Anthology, (University of Texas, Austin, 1998), p. 73.