Marisa Rueda was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1941 to Spanish immigrant parents. She was educated in Argentina and fled to London in 1976 following a military coup that overthrew the Argentinian government. Rueda continued her ceramics work in England and also served as the Minister for Energy of the short-lived and self-proclaimed Frestonia Republic.
Mixed-media artist, Marisa Rueda was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1941 to Spanish immigrant parents who ran a textile company designing and producing women’s lingerie. The eldest of three children, she was expected to join the family business and was enrolled in a specialist art school to refine her artistic abilities for lingerie design. However, her studies took her in a different direction, and in 1960, she graduated from the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón, specialising in ceramics. She quickly gained recognition as one of Argentina’s leading ceramicists, winning awards at Buenos Aires’s annual ceramic exhibitions in 1968 and 1973. In 1976 she received a gold medal at the VI Biennale Internationale de Céramique d’Art in Vallauris, France.
In the early 1970s, Rueda moved to London but returned home after a failed relationship. However, following a military coup in 1976 in Argentina she fled to London again (at the time, she held dual Spanish and Argentinian citizenship). Many in her position chose Spain, but she had fond memories of London as a place of acceptance and tolerance. Soon after, she and her neighbours on Freston Road, Notting Hill, faced eviction to make way for a factory. Seeking both personal and collective autonomy, they declared their street an independent state—the Frestonia Republic—inspired by Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiania and the 1949 film, Passport to Pimlico. Alongside writer and activist Nicholas Albery, Rueda played an active role as Minister for Energy for Frestonia. Though their state was never recognised and they were officially viewed as squatters, in 1977, the community secured a housing co-operative agreement with the Notting Hill Housing Trust. The site also housed an art gallery, The Car Breaker Gallery. During this period, Rueda met her husband, Barry Chaplin, while they were both facilitating activities at an adventure playground. They had a daughter, Cristina, before divorcing in 1993.
Rueda is best known for her satirical and expressive political ceramics, including abstract portrait busts of Argentine generals and larger sculptural installations. Later in her career, she embraced textiles, photography, and film. Much of her work was a personal response, as an exile, to the atrocities committed under the Argentine dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. Her work is characterised by a distortion and fragmentation of the human form, pushing it beyond realistic representation, blending anatomical study with surreal, organic forms, and using texture to evoke a visceral, unsettling emotional response. Despite this abstraction, she sometimes employs a hyper-realistic technique, particularly in her creation of mouths, with a meticulous focus on the textures and details of skin, teeth, and bones.
Rueda exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including in Spain and Argentina, across installations, performances, and both group and solo shows. Some of her ceramic portrait busts featured in travelling exhibitions sponsored by Amnesty International to raise awareness of the crisis in Argentina. During the 1980s, she became involved with several feminist art groups in London and exhibited in key shows, including Women’s Images of Men at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1981. Rueda submitted two pieces reflecting the brutality and oppression inflicted by men in Argentina during the military dictatorship. Her sculptures stood out for their bold and uncompromising expression. Man with Hands (1977) depicts a flayed skin stretched into a strained, almost frantic extension, while Gagged Mouth (1976) captures the intensity of a silent scream, restrained by a tightly stretched sheet. Rueda participated subsequent feminist exhibitions, including Power Plays at the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool in 1983 and Pandora’s Box, Rochdale Art Gallery in 1984.
Beyond exhibiting, Rueda participated in various art initiatives and taught ceramics throughout much of her life. In the 1990s, she co-founded Arts for Movements in Education, a charity supporting arts education for adults with learning disabilities. In 1992, she illustrated Susan Watkins’ Feminism for Beginners. Rueda was appointed Artist in Residence for the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in 1986, a role that culminated in the installation of The Man Who Blows the Clouds in 1989, a large-scale sculpture on Shepherd’s Bush Green. She was a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (RBS). Rueda was also involved with the charity, ACAVA (Association for Cultural Advancement Through Visual Art) over many years, which provides artists' studios and community projects in west London. In 2019 Rueda participated in an intergenerational arts exchange project at Tate Modern, Age/ncy: Art, Ageing and Transition with Flourishing Lives. Marisa Rueda died in London, England in March 2022. In the UK public domain, her work is held in the collection of the University of Essex.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Marisa Rueda]
Publications related to [Marisa Rueda] in the Ben Uri Library