Liliana Maresca

Liliana Maresca (May 8, 1951 – November 13, 1994) was an Argentine artist. Her works cover a variety of styles including sculpture, painting, graphic montages art objects and installations. She was a prominent artist in the period following the dictatorship of the National Reorganization Process. She was a key figure who participated in the artistic scene since the early 80's, starring the enthusiastic young bohemian that detonated Buenos Aires from the early years of democracy rapidly becoming an inflection figure. Her works included objects, installations, performances, interventions in public and semipublic places, and the photographic performances. Maresca died of AIDS in 1994, just a few days after the opening of her retrospective at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires.

Biography

Liliana Maresca was born in Argentina on May 8, 1951 into a middle class family. Little is known about her early childhood, other than that by the age of nineteen, she was living on her own in Belgrano, Buenos Aires. She studied at the Escuela Nacional de Cerámica, the National School of Ceramics in Mexico. Maresca always opted to show her works of sculptures and installations in unconventional settings and with unexpected materials. For example, Maresca organized the group show Lavarte at a laundromat. She was considered to be the "cultural communicator of the eighties" by her peer Marcia Schvartz (b.1955) because of how she created sculptures and installations that broke free from artistic expectations. Her first collective exhibition was around 1983 at Espacio Giesso in Buenos Aires.

Art works Liliana Maresca's first public artistic appearance was in 1983 when she took part in a group exhibition at Estudio Giesso. A short time later she presented her first solo exhibition at El Porteño magazine. These photographs show Maresca posing nude with a white mask. Some have interpreted this work as a commentary on both race and gender, with the white mask complicating Maresca's Latina identity. Additionally, the mask obstructs her face, giving the viewer access only to her nude figure.

A year later in 1984, she participated in Kriptonita verde, an exhibition prepared by the Museo Juan Carlos Castagnino in Mar del Plata. Documents of installations and performances convey a comprehensive panorama of an artistic production that spanned the period between 1983 and 1993.

In 1990, the artist presented the installation Recolecta (Collects), which had the main theme of shopping cart like those pushed by vagrants on city streets where she created replicas of the carts that she called a "national symbol". Painted all white or in gold and silver, the carts were meant to critique the suffering of the socially marginalized.

Photography From a post-avantgarde, post-utopian point of view, all the paradoxical, body- and object-based photo-performances which Liliana Maresca was associated and obsessed since the 1980s and through her death in 1994. Over the next year, he made a series of black and white photographs. In those shots, Maresca was completely naked, surrounded by and interacting with her own artworks, granting each one of them a particular meaning. The object entitled “Carozo de durazno (Peach pit)” – an oversized vagina molded in foam rubber – appears in another image tenderly cradled in the arms of the artist, an ironic suggestion of how to treat the intimate female body. The erotic performance was made to be published in the October issue of the El Libertino magazine in 1993. In 1993 the Maresca-López duo reunites again to perform the latest photo shots, which were commissioned for the posters and postcard of the exhibition invitation Imagen pública – altas esferas (Public image - High spheres). The shooting took place in Liliana Maresca's house along with the oversized prints of images from Página 12 newspaper produced to create and constitute such installation.

The impulse to show and exhibit herself (overexposure) for the register of the other's gaze had to do with a strongly existential content: to "show herself" in order to "be."

1990: Objects and Sculptures. Centoira Gallery, Buenos Aires. Collect. Installation. Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires.

1991: Wotán - Vulcano. Installation. Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires.

1993: Public image - High spheres. Installation. Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires.

1994 : Liliana Maresca: photoperformances, records & tributes

1994: Frenzy. Retrospective 1984 -1994. Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires.

2008: Transmutations. Retrospective Castagnino Museum, Rosario / Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires.

1983: La belleza-fealdad de lo cotidiano. Objetos. Estudio Giesso, Buenos Aires.

1985: Depositarte. El depósito, Buenos Aires. Liquidarte. Casa Puerta Roja, Buenos Aires. Pintura Joven. Zona Joven, Buenos Aires. Ambientación y objetos. Galería 264, Buenos Aires. Lavarte, en una lavandería automática. Escultura, pintura y fotografía. Buenos Aires

1988: Madres y Artistas” (Liliana Maresca, Elba Bairon y Marcia Schvartz). Esculturas. Museo de Bahía Blanca, provincia de Buenos Aires. Mitominas 2. Los mitos de la Sangre. Esculturas. C.C. de Bs. As. (Hoy Recoleta).

1992: La Madera en el Arte. Escultura. Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. Homenaje a Batato Barea. Objeto. Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, Buenos Aires.

1995: Juego de Damas. Objetos. Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. Zen y Arte. Escultura. Espacio Giesso, Buenos Aires. El peronismo y su tiempo. Objeto. Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires.

1999: Arte de Acción. Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires.

2005: Rituales. Casa Brandon, Buenos Aires. Estado de Malestar. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (Macro)

2010: Feria internacional de arte contemporáneo Arte BA, Buenos Aires.

2013: Buenos Aires. Objeto. Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires

2014: Perder la forma humana, Una imagen sísmica de los años ochenta en América Latina. Fotos y Objeto. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía de Madrid. Museo de Lima. Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de UNTREF y Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires.

Other activities 1984: Ciclo de los Barrios. Ambientación. Teatro auditorio de Buenos Aires. No se haga el distraído: el sándwich es Usted. Film de Marcelo Franco. Escenografía y máscaras. Festival Nacional de Cine Súper 8. UNCIPAR. Villa Gesell.

1985: En la ciudad de Cuzco, Perú, realiza experiencias plásticas con la antropóloga Clemencia Aramburu.

El teatro en Emeterio Cerro y su intermedio. Galería Adriana Indik y Teatro Espacios, Buenos Aires.

Ecogógicas. Ambientación para la Obra teatral de Emeterio Cerro. Ambientación. Teatro General San Martín, Buenos Aires.

La Magdalena del Ojón. Ambientación para la obra teatral de Emeterio Cerro. Teatro Espacios. Buenos Aires.

El mundo de las bestias. Ambientación para la obra teatral de Omar Chabán. Discoteca Cemento, Buenos Aires.

Ambientación, Paladium discothèque, Buenos Aires. V Marcha de la resistencia. Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Buenos

1988: La Invencible. Vestuario y escenografía. Obra de teatro dirigida por Omar Chabán. Discoteca Cemento, Buenos Aires.

1993: Maresca se entrega, todo destino. Performance fotográfica revista El Libertino. N° 8, Buenos Aires.