María Moreno

(Madrid 1933- 2020)

Calle de Palos de Moguer

1962

Oil on canvas

79 x 106 cm

Inv. no. P01458_R


María Moreno’s painting is known for the light that seems to radiate from within: pale colours, soft atmospheres and delicately blurred contours. Although she is a core member of the Madrid Realists, her scenes possess a quality bordering on the oneiric. She depicted things that were part of her own life — her street, her flowers, her interiors — but with a heightened sensitivity that turned the everyday into something almost unreal.

She often painted the same spaces as her husband, Antonio López, though from a very different, more intimate, domestic and inward-looking gaze. López used to say that, like Velázquez, María “began in darkness and ended in light”, aptly defining her transition towards an increasingly spiritual form of painting. During the 1960s, while a new figurative approach was gaining ground in Madrid, Moreno worked away silently, removed from changing fashions. She shared a common goal with the Madrid Realists: to capture day-to-day life unadorned, to reveal the passage of time and the beauty hidden in private spaces. In this particular work she depicts a setting she knew intimately, the street formerly known as Palos de Moguer and now Palos de la Frontera, with its dilapidated anonymous buildings.

The women artists associated with Madrid Realism played a discreet role, conditioned by the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and sustained by family circumstances that allowed them to stake out a place for themselves within the art world. Within the group, María Moreno stood out for her contemplative temperament and her inclination towards a kind of almost mystical painting. Always from a position of discretion, she felt at ease in the shadow of the strong public personality of Antonio López, who nevertheless constantly underlined her talent and the extraordinary generosity with which she lived art.

The circumstances of María Moreno’s life and her character give rise to a body of work that combines seriousness, sensitivity and a silent spirituality that transforms the everyday into a space of revelation.