Botánica Jimena, 2015

Ouka Leele Bárbara Allende Gil de Biedma  

Ouka Leele (Bárbara Allende Gil de Biedma, Madrid, 1957 - Madrid, 2022) was a Spanish artist, painter, poet and photographer, winner of the National Photography Prize in 2005. She studied piano and painting, and after giving up Fine Arts she joined the Photocentro school in Madrid; her first photographs appeared in the 1976 book "Principio, 9 jóvenes fotógrafos españoles". Rejecting the look of colour photography, she began hand-colouring black-and-white prints with watercolours, a technique that became her hallmark and first flourished in her iconic series "Peluquería" (1979). A leading figure of the Movida madrileña alongside Javier Mariscal, Ceesepe, Alberto García-Alix and Pedro Almodóvar, she designed the hats for Almodóvar's film "Laberinto de pasiones". She called herself the creator of "domestic mysticism", seeing her work as a sublimation of the everyday, and described it as visual poetry, "a way of speaking without words". She exhibited at Arles at 22, lived in New York in 1980-81, and took part in the São Paulo Biennial and held her first retrospective in 1987, the year she wrapped Madrid's Cibeles fountain for her work "Rappelle-toi, Barbara". She showed at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, in Tokyo, London, Shanghai and Beijing, where her show "Entre dos mundos" (2008) was named best exhibition of the year in China, and was the first Spanish artist at the Shanghai Biennale. Her work is held in the Museo Reina Sofía, the Fondation Cartier and the Centro Andaluz de Fotografía, among others. She also created a nearly 300 m² mural in Ceutí, Murcia, subject of the documentary "La mirada de Ouka Leele" (Goya nominee, 2010). She died of breast cancer in 2022, and PhotoEspaña awarded her its Honour Prize posthumously that year.