ÁNGELES MARCO
Valencia, (Spain) 1924 –Valencia,(Spain) 2008   

She trained as an artist at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Carlos, in Valencia, where subsequently she taught from 1977 to 1987, after being a teacher at the Escuela de Cerámica in Manises. In 1969 she obtained a grant for further studies at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Carrara, where she studied marble. She subsequently travelled to various countries in Europe (Italy in 1971, France, Germany and Switzerland in 1972). In 1973 she began to organise her work in series, following a line close to Post-Minimalism, in which she made a reflection on difference, loss of centre, connections between forms and the area of experience, and the symbology of materials. Between 1980 and 1986 she worked on the series Espacios ambiguos (Ambiguous Spaces) and Entre lo real y lo ilusorio (Between Reality and Illusion), which were shown at the Galería Montenegro in Madrid. These titles defined the elements that were to be essential in her work. In 1988 she was awarded the Alfons Roig Prize by the Provincial Delegation in Valencia. Between 1987 and 1989 she completed her series Tránsito (Transit) and Salto al vacío (Leap into the Void), which were continued some years late in Suplemento al vacío (Supplement to the Void), 1996-98, with a strategy of reworking series or reviewing her programme. In these works Marco reflected on transitoriness and vertigo, associated with an existential position of uncertainty and anguish reinforced by her use of materials –rubber and iron- in which she explored aesthetic and formal qualities. Apart from a parenthesis when she made the series Presente-Instante (Present/Instant), 1991-92, in which she worked on time and used video performance, between 1990 and 1996 she developed the series Suplemento (Supplement) and Suplemento entre (Supplement Between), in which she intertwined an experience of text based on Derrida’s idea of supplement (what is added), questioning communications by means of a copy, hermeticity or the inaccessibility of content, with an experience of the visual. For this she used the idea of a photographic laboratory or camera obscura, where light played a primordial part in the process of exposure and revelation. In the nineties she made various interventions in public spaces, and in 1998 the IVAM presented a major retrospective of her work.