Mariana Sissia

Mariana Sissia —Ramallo, 1980

Mariana Sissia was born in Ramallo in 1980. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario (1998–2003). She completed an artist mentorship with Ernesto Ballesteros and participated in the Artists Program at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2011–2012). In 2013, she was an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre in Canada, and in 2026 she participated in the Mil gotas residency in Beijing. She has held solo exhibitions in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Chicago, and Beijing, and has participated in group exhibitions and international art fairs in Mexico City, Miami, Barcelona, Lima, Basel, Bogotá, Houston, among others. In 2016, she published Mental Landscape, a book bringing together a substantial body of her work.

Her artistic practice traces a formal movement from figurative works that depict the movements of the earth and the ground toward a body of work in which reality becomes fragmented, shifting the focus toward the concept and the very act of drawing. Drawing emerges as the result of a psychological approach to the practice itself. Within this process, Sissia moves between inner tensions, at times asserting control over the material and imposing form upon it, and at others allowing the material to express itself without the intervention of manual dexterity. This dialogue with matter has progressively shaped and guided her practice, which can therefore be understood as a continuum, in which each work constitutes an episode within a larger narrative. Different moments and series of work emerge through this ongoing relationship with the material.

In her early works, matter represents itself. Graphite is pulverized to form the core of a pencil and, through drawing, returns to the earth. The tautology lies not only in the correspondence between what is represented and the material used to represent it, but also between what is represented and the very method through which the drawing is constructed. In these works, Sissia builds the image through the superposition of thin layers of graphite, avoiding the pressure that would otherwise suffocate the support with the weight of the material. In this way, the process replicates the lamellar arrangement of the carbon atoms that constitute graphite in its natural state.

Sissia then makes graphite frottages on the stone surfaces from which the material originates, and works by interpreting these marks on paper, attending to variables such as pressure, speed, and the angle of inclination of the tool. The resulting drawings are heterogeneous, bringing together different and antagonistic forces, in which graphic gestures coexist with their own counterpoints. During this period, her work explores the possibilities of drawing as a site of encounter between physical practice and psychic experience. She approaches technique not as a means of representation, but as a graphic action capable of inducing particular states of consciousness, akin to meditation.

In her most recent works, Sissia develops what she calls a “mercurial bath”: she dissolves the substance in solvents, generating suspensions of graphite powder. These suspensions are then dynamized and poured onto the paper, allowing the material to express itself through its own memory or essence.