María Moreno

(Madrid 1933- 2020)


20th century Spanish


From a very young age, María Moreno was driven by a profound artistic vocation and a literary sensibility that would shape her inner world and her way of perceiving reality. She studied at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, where she enrolled in 1954 to study painting. There she became close friends with Antonio López, Isabel Quintanilla, Amalia Avia, Julio and Francisco López Hernández, and Lucio Muñoz, a circle of artists who would become known as the Madrid Realists.

In 1961 she married Antonio López, with whom she shared thematic affinities such as the observation of their everyday surroundings and working directly from life, yet without relinquishing her own distinct artistic voice.

Framed within the Madrid-based
movement, her work began to gain international visibility in the 1970s thanks to exhibitions in Germany and the United Kingdom. Although her solo shows were few and far between, they received widespread acclaim, as was the case of the one organised by Herbert Meyer-Ellinger in Frankfurt in 1973 and another at the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris in 1990, which consolidated her reputation.

Her painting, closely bound to her own personal life and surroundings, encompasses landscapes — particularly of Madrid and La Mancha — portraits, interiors, still lifes and, from the 1990s onwards, gardens and flowers, a subject matter to which she was particularly drawn.

In her later years she took part in major group shows, such as Otra realidad. Compañeros en Madrid at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1992 and Realistas de Madrid at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in 2016, both of which explored the trajectory and legacy of the group.

María Moreno died in Madrid in 2020 at the age of 86, leaving behind a sincere, luminous and, above all, profoundly human body of work.