Frustrated Fine Arts student, Madrid artist who painted her own snaps, dies a month before her 65th birthday
Bárbara Allende Gil de Biedma always said that she got into photography by accident. “I’ve been scribbling since I was a little girl. I’ve always been interested in art, drawing, painting and occasionally I’d bring a camera with me. Now I think it was the picture that sought me out and picked me,” confessed photographer, painter and poet Ouka Leele a few years ago In short, a total creator, passionate about color, who died last night in a hospital in Madrid along with her daughter, the rest of her family and friends a month before (June 29) her 65th birthday.
That childhood was marked by visits to the Prado – he was struck by the paintings of El Greco – and to the Sierra de Guadarrama with his parents Gabriel, an architect with a passion for painting, and Victoria, sister of the poet Jaime Gil de bidma. “The forest was forever nailed to my soul,” she said in 2015. That passion for painting turned her into a frustrated attempt at studying fine arts, which she put aside to try and learn to play the piano while studying the most basic elements of art discovered that he has inaugurated it in Photocentro. Meanwhile, he overcame lymphoma at the age of 22.
Already in his first major exhibition, ‘Peluquería’ (1978-79), Ouka Leele demonstrated his special free spirit. A name he chose from an unlikely constellation painted in a painting by the gardener, his sentimental partner for many years. At the end of the last century, he found out that with another ‘e’, his stage name meant ‘going around the world’ in the language of the Bubi of Equatorial Guinea. He added that vowel with great satisfaction.
In the exhibition, the artist decided to make all the photos in black and white and then give them the color she wanted with her watercolors. She brought her two passions together and started a career that initially took her to Mexico and New York.
On his return in 1981, Ouka Leele fitted perfectly into the artistic movement that flourished after the dictatorship: the Madrid Movida. She became the unofficial photographer. “It is a phenomenon in which I was proud to participate, although it cannot be said that I was the photographer of the movement,” explains the artist. «I lived those years with passion, just like everyone else, but maybe it was Pablo Pérez-Mínguez. The whole world went through his studio,” recalls the faithful representative of postmodernity.
At that time he rubbed together with Javier Mariscal, Ceesepe, Alberto García-Alix and Pedro Almodóvar, for whom he designed the hats for ‘Laberinto de pasiones’ (1982). Five years later, the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art devoted a retrospective to him. That same year, he took part in the São Paulo Biennale and organized the big show in Plaza de Cibeles, closing the traffic, where he performed the myth of Atalanta and Hippomenes. In 1988 he arrived in Paris with his giant Polaroids for the Cartier Foundation. Ouka Leele’s works are in numerous countries and art galleries such as the Reina Sofía.
Over the years, Ouka Leele’s work evolves and opens her creative space to the outside. An example of this is his work in Ceutí. National Photography Award in 2005, Silver Medal of the Community of Madrid and Medal of the City (2022) where she was born, Ouka Leele assured that every tool to express herself was worthwhile, «from a mobile phone to the most powerful camera on the market ».
Source: La Verdad
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