Marie Orensanz

Mar del Plata, Argentina - 1936

            Marí Nalte Orensanz was born in 1936 in the seaside city of Mar del Plata. In 1972 she decided to add an “e” to her name to avoid any confusion, after a buyer returned a work when he realized she was a woman artist. This incident marked her awareness of gender inequality and she preferred to clearly indicate her identity, even if she did not sell anything. Marie defines herself as a nomadic artist, who tries to escape the formal classifications of art critics. Her origin amalgamates multiple nationalities: Spanish, French and English, a sort of providence of her future path through the world. 

            When she was 17, a family trip to Europe revealed to her that the world could be transformed through art. Once settled in Buenos Aires, she enrolled in Emilio Pettoruti's workshop where she learned various techniques. After five years, she was sure of her technical mastery, but she felt that she had not yet found her own language. Thus, she joined the workshop of Antonio Seguí, who had returned from Mexico. There, according to Marie, she learned the “freedom to do what one wants” in art. Her nomadism extended as well to the choice of materials, which is always linked to the time and place where she is living. During a stay in Milan, for example, she made drawings that she later tore up because she did not like them to be delimited by the lines of the paper. In Carrara she worked with pieces of the famous marbles, broken fragments that had a former life and found a rebirth in her hands.

            Pensar es un hecho revolucionario, one of her most emblematic works, is also a statement that can be understood as Orensanz's own mantra. This phrase is part of one of the twelve postulates of the manifesto Eros, which she presented in Italy in 1974, and continues to be a beacon for the development of her work. For Marie, thinking, along with humor, is a daily exercise: “pensar es un trabajo y eso da libertad” [thinking is a job and that brings freedom], she says in an interview for the Parque de la Memoria in the city of Buenos Aires.  Her work Limitada (1978), a self-portrait of Orensanz with that word on her forehead, appears, then, as a way of seeing and using one's own body as a political tool and of responding with mischief to those who try to invalidate feminine thought. Art and thought are shown as faces of the same coin: the freedom to create a world from the fragments that we are.