Collection: Mariana Alzamora

Mariana Alzamora was born in the USA and raised in Lima, Peru. She came to live in Deià in 2004. Before choosing to live in the village, she had spent time in Costa Rica.

She was attracted by the Mediterranean, a simpler way of life and, as she puts it, the opportunity to ‘integrate culture and nature. You could be walking on a dirt path or picking olives discussing the most profound philosophical questions. It was, for me, the healthy way to live a balanced life.’

Mariana grew up surrounded by art and music. She studied art at Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan before travelling to Greece in 1969 to find herself. 

Although she loves to paint scenes from nature bathed in sunlight and colour, she is most interested in exploring her own interior, symbolic landscapes, using mythic imagery as an emotional response to nature. She has worked in many different media, including collage, painting on whitewashed board, canvas and silk, making clay reliefs, monoprints and sculpture.

The Print and Study Room of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has in its collection a series of eight unique prints made by Mariana, each overprinted and, as Mariana puts it, ‘superimposing time in one space’. Her work can also be found in private collections in many different parts of the world.

More recently, she has made paintings inspired by light and the curved horizon of the iron sculptures of American Artist Richard Serras, known for his large-scale, site-specific work influenced by the hulls of ships. Working in etchings, paint and clay, she is currently making hand coiled, circular 'vessels of hope enclosing the void, a meditation on possibility' derived from Pandora’s Amphora, originally an ‘all giving Earth mother’. Her most recent paintings on the theme of generations are titled Ephigenia’s Letter.