La luz de su pierna,
me hace suspirar, 2007


Sus tres majestades, 1986


Rafael, 2006

OUKA LEELE. Inédita.

The film director Rafael Gordon has been responsible for selecting the works that comprise this exhibition. Only one of the photographs on display has been painted over; looking at unpainted photos by OUKA LEELE constitutes a great novelty, which will surprise even those who are very familiar with the work of this prolific artist. Apart from this, the one thing that the 64 works included in the show have in common is their hitherto unseen status; in every other respect, they are incredibly varied, both in technique - taken using analogue, digital, or mobile phone cameras, or altered in Photoshop - and in their themes and the dates when they were created.

OUKA LEELE. The artist.
The long and varied professional career of OUKA LEELE, right up to the present day, is covered by this exhibition of previously unpublished photographs which celebrates the artistic maturity achieved over her fifty years of life and her three decades of work. The artistic flair of Bárbara Allende Gil de Biedma (OUKA LEELE's real name) became clear at a young age. Her childhood was spent between Madrid and San Rafael, in Segovia, where the woodlands made a deep and lasting impression on her. She grew up surrounded by strong aesthetic stimuli which soon awoke in her a natural and yet unusually intense artistic sensibility. OUKA LEELE herself says that she knew that she wanted to be an "apprentice of nature" from very early on, just like the painters she discovered in Madrid's Prado museum, another source of stimuli that would prove decisive in the development of her personal imagination. The artist has even called this museum the "temple of my emotions".

A serious illness in her adolescence brought her into close contact with death; it was to become a crucial chapter in her life. The overcoming of this event generated within her spirit an intense love for live which still shows through in her work today, but which is most clearly expressed in these verses, written in her youth: “Qué bonito es / que se me llenen los pulmones de aire / que se me clave la luz en los ojos / que se me meta el olor de las flores hasta las venas / que me lata el corazón de emoción / que se me ponga roja la cara / por un sentimiento” (How pretty it is / that my lungs fill with air / that the light shines in my eyes / that the scent of the flowers fills me right to the veins / that my heart beats with emotion / that my face burns red / for a feeling).

In the Madrid of the 1980s, the movida was in full swing and it is not surprising that a creative spirit like that of OUKA LEELE - back then Ouka Lele, with a single "e" in the middle - fitted so well into the artistic ambience of that time and place. A flurry of activity was the result, which would lead the artist to cast her gaze abroad and to embrace other artistic disciplines, such as drawing, screen-printing, painting and literature.

Soon after, she established herself in Paris, spending long periods in Majorca, becoming a mother in 1990, triumphing in ARCO and becoming OUKA LEELE - with one more "e". In the last decade, which could be considered to be that of her definitive consecration, she has received the most important awards of her career: in 2004, the Culture Prize from the Community of Madrid, and in 2005, the National Photography Prize.

Today, OUKA LEELE's photographs are considered "icons of their time", in the words of Rafael Gordon, curator of OUKA LEELE- Inédita. This is no surprise, considering the strong integration of life, emotions and aesthetic expression that has always marked the photographer's work. "In a society degraded by the vulgarity of mass-produced and massively-consumed art," adds Gordon, "invoking the aesthetic sensibility of each [individual] person has become a matter of urgency. The civilizing sensibility of Bárbara Allende Gil de Biedma has been trying to associate art with reflection for more than three decades, creating an art of ideas in order to reach the ultimate expression of what it means to make art".

OUKA LEELE. Inédita.
The Subdirección General de Promoción de las Bellas Artes del Ministerio de Cultura has organised this show to mark OUKA LEELE's winning of the National Photography Prize, and to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of her birth. After going on show in the exhibition halls of the Museo del Traje in Madrid, it has visited Valladolid and Logroño before arriving in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Being an anthological exhibition, OUKA LEELE - Inédita both permits and suggests different readings, different routes to a single reality: the poetic and visual imagination of OUKA LEELE. The presence of works completed during different periods of her career makes it possible to appreciate the progressive consolidation of her language, and the perception of the works as a whole aims to transmit the idea of "a human comedy in 64 photographs", in the words of the exhibition's curator, who also explains that we are faced with a "profound, interior journey, full of painful feeling".

Portraits, self-portraits and scenes which are authentic visual poems together make up this eclectic exhibition, which is loaded with references to worlds both external (ancient civilisations, diverse mythologies, literature) and internal (family, friends, dreams...).

OUKA LEELE's portraits are presented as attempts to redefine the human subject, what we all are, after all. The visual poems show at times "fortuitous and gleaming associations", as Rafael Gordon points out, and at other times they present realities which are more understandable from the point of view of logic and the suggestiveness - no less poetic - of their titles. The self-portraits, utterly removed from narcissism, are here, frequently, an exercise in searching out and testing the contours of identity and, in turn, an exercise in presence made real, in that the artist, in the words of the exhibition's curator, refuses to "dodge her presence among us, the spectators, and the beings immortalized in her work, thus avoiding the isolation of a world recreated by and for authenticity".

OUKA LEELE - Inédita is an opportunity to come into contact, more comprehensively than ever, with a language, a sensibility and a poetic discourse which emerge from a life experience - including that "painful feeling" - which has grown over time, over our time, to reach the present day. Perhaps this is the reason that Rafael Gordon presents the exhibition as "a unique event".

Generoso encuentro con la belleza, 2007

Bajo la luz de Leonardo Piti, Aitana y Charna, 2006

El espejo de Venus tiene escamas, 1985

Rana alucinada com mi pie ante
vendedora de lechugas, impasible, 1975