Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, and another student at the Residencia, José Bello, Mallo's artistic vision was an important catalyst in the Spanish avant-garde movement." Her paintings of the 1920s represent urban entertainments and sports, composed in complex overlapping arrangements that express the dynamism of modern life. These works, such as La Verbena (The Festival) of 1927, combine sharply defined, smoothly modeled forms with bright colors. The 1930s and the Second Spanish Republic Mallo’s work became more surrealistic in the early 1930s, including geometric visual language and themes that ranged from fruits to agricultural structures as well as creating ceramic disks with themes of fish and bulls. Mallo collaborated intensely with Rafael Alberti starting in 1931. In those years she painted the series Cloacas (Sewers) y Campanarios (Belfries). Her first exhibit in Paris took place in the Pierre Loeb Gallery in 1932. There she began her surrealist stage. She returned to Madrid in 1933 and actively participated in the Society of Iberian Artists. This was the beginning of a period in which Mallo’s interests emphasized geometric order and nature’s intricacies. In that same year, Mallo, committed to the Second Spanish Republic, started teaching as a drawing professor at the Institute of Arévalo, in the School Institute of Madrid, and at the Ceramics School of Madrid, for which she designed a series of dishes that no longer exist, and where she learned mathematic and geometric concepts to use in ceramics. She frequently spent time with Miguel Hernández, with whom she maintained a romantic relationship. 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. From 1936, she began her constructive age, while still exhibiting with surrealist painters in London and Barcelona. 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.