Madrid. A neighborhood in the city center. A fourth-floor apartment in a building, with supporting pilings here and there, the abandonment clear to see. For the last eight years this has been home to 120 paintings by the North American surrealist painter Margaret Marley Modlin. She died in 1998, to be followed two years later by her husband, and then, another two years on, by their only son. Margaret’s last work is also housed here, in the same unfinished state in which she left it. When she died, her husband Elmer began to go to pieces, entering the closed loop of melancholy; he wanted to leave everything precisely as it had been when she was alive. He had been a Hollywood actor in his day, and she a professor at the Santa Barbara University of Fine Arts in California. He, having been active in bringing the Nagasaki bomb to fruition, later turned his back on his past and began leading nationwide protests against the North American military police; his jobs in Hollywood immediately dried up at that point. On the advice of their friend Henry Miller, they fled to Spain. 1972. She shut herself inside the Madrid apartment to paint, only emerging on three occasions: for two exhibitions of her work, and for her own burial. The husband and son took charge of all domestic tasks and social affairs, both taking on any paid work they could so she could continue painting. Her paintings contain clear nods to the surrealism of De Chirico, presenting open spaces that don’t so much play with scale as with the vanishing points of inanimate objects: the people she inserts are the archetypes of people, so, rather than surrealism, it’s a pure mysticism: the human being and the point at which it disappears. Like her—she died without leaving any traces of herself. Only one of her paintings features a tree.