Biography

Mariana Alzamora was born in USA in 1948.

She was raised in Lima, Peru. The family left the country in 1963 after the death of her father in 1961, and in 1963 moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, the hometown of her mother, artist Jeanne Alzamora.

In 1969 she left the University of Michigan before completing her degree, dissatisfied with the approach to the art curriculum. She travelled and settled in Lindos, Rhodes, Greece, where she worked on a series of paintings she called The Kingdom Within. In 1972 she returned to Peru.

In 1977 she moved to Florida with her two small sons.

In Boca Grande, Gasparilla Island Studios, created by her mother, enabled Mariana to develop an ample body of work both in clay and painting on silk celebrating the abundant sea life and lush vegetation of the island.

In 1988, in the Retablos, she returned to the human figure this time in low and high relief clay panels, enclosed and framed. In time the images would hang without an enclosure, and later become free standing forms. Mariana Alzamora has been invited for one woman exhibitions at Ruth Jones Gallery, Boca Grande; Olin Gallery at Kenyon College, Ohio; St Louis Center for the Arts; Fort Myers, Art Alliance; Johan Fust Library, Boca Grande.

In 2001 she moved to Costa Rica.

She created large oil paintings. free from the gravity of the clay. The paintings became studies in color and light with themes "taught by the clay".

In 2004 she came back to the Mediterranean, settling in her current home in Mallorca. She learned to engrave in copper, to record and further develop ideas originating in clay and in painting. At present, in artists books. she incorporates the printed image with text.

In Mallorca she has designed and painted the costumes for the opera by Mike Watts inspired by Federico García Lorca's first play El Maleficio de la Mariposa.

Mariana Alzamora's recent work on paper, are exercises of the wave, of light, color, integration, desintegration, cooperation, opposition, control, flow, letting go.

Works by Mariana Alzamora can be found in institutions and public collections, as in the Print and Drawing Study Room of The Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and in private collections around the world.