780 works of art and documents.

Maruja Mallo (Viveiro, Lugo, 1902-Madrid, 1995) was one of the most important Spanish women artists of the twentieth century. Her real name was Ana María Gómez González. In 1922, she moved with her family to Madrid, where she studied at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. There she met Salvador Dalí, who introduced her to surrealism and brought her into contact with prominent members of the so-called Generation of ’27, such as García Lorca, Luis Buñuel, María Zambrano, Margarita Manso and Concha Méndez. During this stage of her life she illustrated several works by the poet Rafael Alberti, met Ortega y Gasset, collaborated as an illustrator in Revista de Occidente and held her first individual exhibition in the magazine’s salons.

In the 1930s, she began to travel to Paris, mingling with André Breton, Max Ernst, Magritte, De Chirico and Miró, and executing a fully surrealist pictorial work. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she went first to Portugal and then to the Americas, living for periods in Buenos Aires and New York. She returned to Spain in the early 1960s, settling in Madrid, whose stale cultural environment she did not fit into, and neither she nor her work gained the recognition they deserved until the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the following decade. In 1979, she held an anthological exhibition in which she showed her last pictorial series, Los moradores del vacío, and in 1982 the Spanish Ministry of Culture awarded her the la Medalla de Oro al mérito en las Bellas Artes. Later she received the Medalla de Oro de Madrid (1990) and the Medalla de Oro de la Xunta de Galicia (1991). At the age of 90, she exhibited the works completed during her period in the Americas for the first time in the Guillermo de Osma Gallery in Madrid.

The Maruja Mallo Archive is made up of more than 750 items, including hundreds of original works (paintings, drawings from the 40s, 50s and 70s, notebooks, autographs), photographs (from the 40s), correspondence, books and catalogs (from the 20s to the 70s) and press articles.