“Nature has taught me to see, to feel. Through the camera I have been able to transmit and capture my feelings, passions and obsessions.” This is how Patricia Allende Gil de Biedma described two of her passions: photography and nature, which she managed to integrate into her life. The other passion was his sister Bárbara, three years younger, an artist who became one of the icons of the Madrid Movida in the late seventies as Ouka Leele. Precisely, Patricia Allende worked a couple of weeks ago on an exhibition dedicated to her sister at the La Hora Azul photography bookstore in Madrid. Always enthusiastic when it comes to talking about her photographic work and exhibiting it (she was currently participating in a collective in the Avila town of Arévalo), Patricia Allende, who was enthusiastic about several personal projects, died suddenly this Saturday at the age of 70 in Madrid , sources close to the photographer have confirmed. His mortal remains have been transferred to the La Paz funeral home, in Alcobendas (Madrid).
Allende leaves a work characterized by images in which he sought, with great sensitivity, abstraction from different elements of nature, especially water, perhaps due to his Leonese origins in a town that was buried under the waters of a swamp. That fascination with freezing the water in her photos came from when she went fishing with friends, as she said. While her friends were fishing, she dedicated herself to taking images.
Born in Madrid, on September 29, 1954, she said that she was a happy girl and always very close to her sister Barbara. It was, precisely, Bárbara who encouraged her to become interested in photography in the mid-eighties, a discipline to which she fully dedicated herself a few years later. Although he began as a landscape painter, over the years he leaned more towards informalism and abstraction, experimenting with light and shadows. In those beginnings, his project stands out Tajo-Tejo, a leisurely tour of the longest river on the Iberian Peninsula, which was exhibited at Expo 98 in Lisbon, dedicated to the oceans.
She was a photographer who liked to work the old way, in analogue and without making laboratory retouches to her images, “I don’t manipulate anything,” she said. It was difficult for him to incorporate the digital world. Enthusiast of art and philosophy (quotes from philosophers used to serve as a reference for his photographic projects), his inspiration came through the contemplation of nature, as proven by the titles of some of his series, from Haikus1991; lunar space (2003), About sensible chaosfrom the same year, with water as the protagonist; Identity (2005), about portraits of people in the shower; either Nature (2016), perhaps one of the most notable, with images of flowers, plants and landscapes in warm tones. What was common in all his works was the stillness that these images of nature transmitted, which formed “a mysterious and introverted discourse,” as the photographer and art historian Concha Casajús wrote.
With work, among other collections, in the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country-Artium, in Vitoria; the Dos de Mayo Art Center (Móstoles) and at the ONCE Foundation, he had his first individual exhibition in 1998, south seain the City Council of Cádiz, which was followed by several more, such as Spaces and Shadows (2002), at the Madrid City Council; About Sensible Chaos (Vitoria, 2003); Abstraction (Teruel, 2021), An Imaginary World (2022), at the Galileo Cultural Center, in Madrid; until its retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Villanueva de los Infantes (Ciudad Real), which could be seen in the second half of 2023.
Since 1991 he had also participated in numerous groups, up to the one currently in Arévalo, The rain does not come from the sky, as she herself announced on her Instagram account two weeks ago. His work has also been seen outside Spain: in Portugal, Italy, Poland, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Morocco and Japan. A career to which is added her work as an exhibition curator and professor of photography courses and masters at different schools and universities. She leaves us with a lover of the art of the image, for whom “the power of photography resided in its fascinating illusion of reality.”
