Maria Ortega Estepa

María Ortega Estepa - Mapping-me

Biografía del Artista: María Ortega Estepa (Córdoba, 1983) has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Seville, where she currently lives and works as a visual artist. She is an art therapist with a degree from the Pablo de Olavide University, completing her training at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. She develops her work in different media: painting, drawing and mural intervention... with a work closely linked to the social and educational field from the beginning. María has been working on the street since 2008, the year in which she came into contact with the Saharawi people through her first mural in a context of political conflict. Since then, her activity has not been limited to a specific medium or place, as she carries out her work both in the public and private spheres, hospitals or social centres, leaving her mark with very subtle and powerful work in almost all the places where she carries out her interventions and workshops, always interacting with the public with whom she intervenes. She currently works in the neighbourhood of the three thousand houses in Seville as the head of the Alalá Foundation's Plastic Arts workshop and coordinates the educational workshops of the INICIARTE Programme. As a plastic artist she works with various galleries on the Spanish scene, and has received numerous awards and grants that have led her to exhibit in places such as the CAC Málaga or BilbaoArte. Her work is part of numerous private and public collections.

María Ortega Estepa's work questions the idea of nature as something timeless, dominated by a personal meaning and a work based on stories from older people who tell them about life. Through various series that the author has made over the last six years and closely linked to each other, she now proposes a new cartography where the look at the natural landscape is multiplied through various paths. The tree continues to be an icon present in his work: from the panoramic views of dense forests, to the micro-landscape with a work of introspection that today dominates his proposal or his micro-world full of experiences, he has been transforming his way of understanding art by responding to the new way in which he relates to nature. Through vegetal elements, umbilically rooted in the earth, Ortega does nothing but relive her life, strengthen ties with her loved ones, with the family environment that shelters her. The memory of childhood, surely the leitmotiv that drives all her work, finds its maximum expression in this icon because it is a silent witness to countless things.