When she was a young girl, Mallo would alternate between living with parents and her aunt (Juliana Lastres Carrer) and uncle (Ramiro Gonzalez Lorenzo).
In Madrid she met artists, writers, and scientists from the Spanish Generation ’27 like Salvador Dalí, Concha Méndez, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Gregorio Prieto, Federico García Lorca, Margarita Manso, Luis Buñuel, María Zambrano, and Rafael Alberti, with whom she maintained a relationship until he met María Teresa León.
Author Ortega y Gasset recognized her paintings in 1928 and organized her first exhibit in Revista de Occidente, which was very successful, praised for its originality and freshness.
It displayed ten oil paintings representing towns full of sun, bullfighters and women from Madrid, as well as colored prints of machinery, sports, and cinema from the beginning of the century.
Her paintings of the 1920s represent urban entertainments and sports, composed in complex overlapping arrangements that express the dynamism of modern life.
They also planned the drama Los hijos de la piedra (The sons and the stone) together, which was inspired by the events of Casas Viejas.
She participated as a teacher in the Pedagogical Missions, which brought her closer to her homeland, Galicia, which after a few months was surprised by the Spanish Civil War.
In May 1936 her third individual exhibit took place, organized by ADLAN in the Center of Studies and Information of the Construction in the Career of Saint Jerónimo of Madrid with a series of sixteen paintings from Cloacas y Campanarios, the series of twelve works from Arquitecturas minerales y vegetales (Mineral and vegetable architectures), and sixteen drawings from Instrucciones rurales (Rural instructions), which was published in 1949 in the Clan Library with a prologue from Jean Cassou.
She was remembered for her affairs and her otherwise scandalous behavior such as winning a "Blasphemy Contest" and riding into church on a bicycle during mass than for her artist work.
From her time in Buenos Aires, the Museum of Drawing and Illustration now treasures a collection of two of Mallo's temperas on paper representing half-real and half-fantastical animals.
In 1945, she went to Chile and traveled along the Viña del Mar and the Isla de Pascua (Easter Island), together with Pablo Neruda, looking for inspiration for a request for a mural for a theater in Los Angeles from Buenos Aires, which was inaugurated in October the same year.
Instead of being acknowledged for her artistic work, during exile she was remembered for instances in her life that did not matter: Affairs, scandalous behavior, and riding into church on a bicycle during mass.
[7] It is said that "Mallo [would] shock her contemporaries with her avant-garde art, she would cause distress among them because she refused to conform to any of the rules the patriarchy attempted to impose on women.
In a biography by Shirley Mangini, the author notes that "it is significant that Mallo's early memories were of street fairs, since they are the subject of her first major series of paintings, Las Verbenas.
The era of intense political, social, cultural and economic change in which Mallo grew up also inspired her artwork.It caused her to display a new language that celebrates the female body and sexuality.
Streets with Mallo's name can also be found in cities like Almería,[11] Estepona, Mérida,[12] Boadilla del Monte, Guadalajara, and the Castle of San Juan.