Liliana Maresca

Critical text

Liliana Maresca (1951–1994, Buenos Aires) was one of the protagonists of the artistic scene of the 1980s in Buenos Aires. She was arguably the artist who best condensed the delirious, ironic, and iconoclastic vein of the underground scene of the city, reflecting the youth bohemian that exploded as a cathartic movement after the return of democracy. A naturally multi-media artist, she produced paintings, objects, sculptures, installations, performances, and photo-performances. While her most well-known works directly address the commodification of life, and often take a very politically charged stance against the hypocrisy of society, her repertoire was also fertilized by studies of alchemy and intense spiritual searches. Maresca symbolically and physically offered her own body as a battlefield to question the status quo, as demonstrated by works such as Liliana Maresca con su obra (Liliana Maresca with her Work, 1983), and Imagen Pública – Altas Esferas (Public Image – High Political Spheres, 1993), among many. Maresca found in photo-performance the ideal medium to point out and denounce situations of social and gender-based violence, hypocrisy and double discourses, always committing her body, assuming different fictitious personalities, protagonists of stories where the image becomes a vehicle for the artist’s actions.

Text by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

The artist’s voice

All the masks I composed fell Naked Like a shell Naked Swept away by the storm of the river.