The painter, photographer and poet Ouka Leele passed away this week in Madrid at the age of 64. That was the moment when, thanks to the reaction of the media and personalities, when many discovered the photographs of what she was one of the most representative faces of the Madrid scene.
Their photographs of the Movida They are testimony to a time that she knew how to fill with color. And it is that with a style that is difficult to classify, the artist stood out for coloring her photos in black and white. Didn't you know the artist either? We invite you to discover in small pieces both her life and her work.
Ouka Leele
Barbara Allende Gil de Biedma, that was the real name of Ouka Leele, an artist and photographer who died this week. She was born in Madrid on June 29, 1957, in a family of Bilbao's upper bourgeoisie, she was one of the main protagonists of the Movida Madrileña and that is how she has been remembered.
She started photography in the late seventies, although she had always wanted to be a painter. And precisely for this purpose she moved to Barcelona in 1978. It was there that she began to hand-paint her black and white photographs, and where a year later he participated in his first individual exhibition.
However, it was his photographic work of the Madrid Movida the one that gave him his greatest recognition. Passionate about color, she participated during those years in exhibitions around Europe, the United States and Japan. Her participation in the Sao Paulo Contemporary Art Biennial (Brazil) and her first retrospective exhibition at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (Madrid) in 1987 stand out.
In 2005 he was awarded the National Photography Award. The jury then valued "her decisive testimony of the sensitivity and the Spanish artistic life from the 80s to now, and her personal chromatic contributions, compositional and narrative She also received years later, among other awards, the Silver Medal of the Community of Madrid.
Recently the artist was working with charcoal and rosewood, for the satisfaction of rubbing her hand with ashes on paper. She also confessed that she really enjoyed handling Photoshop, which makes it faster.
His most emblematic works
All the Photographs from the Hairdressing series they are a “sublimation of the everyday and the domestic”. This is one of the first series of the artist composed of 30 photos and that characterizes very well the Spanish Movida movement at the end of the 70s.
Emblematic is also the photography “Rapelle-Toi, Barbara”, inspired by the myth of Atlanta and Hippomenes and for which the center of Madrid was paralyzed in 1987. As the artist herself recounted, «a blockbuster that lasted a whole day, with twelve or thirteen people posing, a photographer in a helicopter and me climbing with the camera to a crane».
Rapelle-Toi, Barbara and Veranos de la Villa. Ouka Leele
Other original watercolors by the artist hand-painted on black and white photographs are: Poster for Meye Maier (1984), which features the designer from Bilbao; Wounded like mist by the sun (1987), the cover photograph in which she represents herself in front of a heart pierced by Eros's arrow; and Veranos de la Villa, our favorite and in which the artist photographs her daughter María Rosenfeldt.
Poster for Meye Maier and The Kiss. Ouka Leele.
Another of the most emblematic works of the artist also drinks it with the same technique: The kiss. An ultra-colorful work born from a commission from Penthouse magazine back in 1980 and that has aged tremendously well.
Do you want to see these and other works in situ? Can be found in a series of collections, such as the Arco Collection (Madrid), the Cartier Foundation (Paris), the La Caixa Foundation (Barcelona), the Cervantes Institute (Lisbon), the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum (Madrid), and the Tabaco Gitanas (Paris).
Did you know the work of the artist from Madrid? If not, are you now curious to explore it and get to know Ouka Leele better?