Maruja Mallo was associated with the Generation of 27 within the Spanish avant garde movement of artists, writers and philosophers whose members included Federico García Lorca, Ernestina de Champourcín, Pedro Salinas, Rosa Chacel, María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti with whom she maintained a relationship. The female half of them, known as the “Women Without Hats” Las Sinsombrero because they refused to wear a hat in public, something that in that time was a rule of respectability in terms of class and gender, but they went beyond that and used their art to generate a change in the spanish collective consciousness. Their attitude somehow reflected the claims and demands of Spanish suffragism and early feminism. In her Paris period she got familiar in Surrealist circles.
A group of women artists whose work stood out on the Surrealist landscape: Eileen Agar, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Germaine Dulac, Leonor Fini unveiling male nudes in which the men became the objects of the female gaze, Valentine Hugo, Frida Kahlo, Dora Maar who created photomontages with strange compositions, traces of fascination for the horrible and the shapeless, Lee Miller manipulated images through solarisation and photograms, Nadja, Meret Oppenheim (german born Swiss surrealist artist and photographer), Kay Sage, Ángeles Santos, Dorothea Tanning Toyen, Remedios Varo and Unica Zürn. Near is also Louise Bourgeois altough she exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.