Liliana Maresca

Buenos Aires, Argentina (1951-1994)

            Liliana Maresca was an unclassifiable artist, she made paintings, sculptures, installations, photos, poems, and performances and presented more than 40 solo and group exhibitions. In addition, she organized events that made her a nexus and connecting point for the artistic community of the city of Buenos Aires during the 80s and early 90s. She was the coordinator of several key artistic projects such as La Kermesse and La Conquista. She died a few weeks after the opening of her last exhibition. In her short but intense life, she became the center and amalgam of the post-dictatorship underground art scene. 

            Rebellious and atypical, to escape family asphyxia, she married a doctor and lived for a while as a “Belgrano lady”. At that time, she began to draw intensely. She could not find her place in the world, so she had to invent it. Bored with the life of a housewife, she separated and moved to Estados Unidos 834, to an old and semi-ruined “PH”. To survive, she decided to rent the rooms. The house became crowded and she, little by little, became the owner of a boarding house. Like a mother taking in orphans, Maresca turned her house in Estados Unidos into a mythical gathering place. The first objects Liliana made around 1982 were barely intervened garbage: cans, rickety chairs, rotten wood, cement and torn sacks. Soon after, the super-production began: the photos with Marcos López, the network of friends, the performances, the posters with phrases. Among them, it stands out one in which her phone number appears under the slogan "Maresca se entrega” [Maresca surrenders], part of a photoperformance she made together with photographer Alejandro Kuropatwa and which was published in El Libertino magazine.

            At that moment of creative explosion, Liliana found out that she had AIDS. At that time, Liliana and Marcia Schvartz rented a house in Tigre, "Las Camelias", located on the Caraguatá River. The first branches and roots were probably carried to her feet by the southeast winds. With them, Maresca created her most silent works, which, in the general context of her work, appear as mute offerings of an intimate ritual. Thus, the brutal and dirty objects give way to a work more self-focused, more precise. In April 1989, in her first solo show for Adriana Indik Gallery, Maresca showed No todo lo que brilla es oro, where, invested with the majesty of the mountains, her branches and roots emerged on metal bases. Perhaps her readings on alchemy, which date from the same period, awakened her interest in the transformation of metals and inspired a work that creates a seamless continuity between the branches and their bronze bases.

            The disease, which so far Maresca had managed to keep at bay, began to progress. In early 1994, meningitis struck again, this time finding her tired. At that moment, when her strength seemed to have left her, it occurred to her to make a retrospective of her work. That was the origin of Frenesí, her last exhibition, held at the Centro Cultural Recoleta. Liliana devoted only fourteen years to art. And yet, that time was enough for her work to become an essential reference in the history of contemporary Argentine art. Tireless, Maresca combines the sacred and the profane, the political and the sentimental. À la Maresca, all the work you left us, Liliana!