Mariana Sissia

Studio Charlone 960
Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina

E-mail sissia.estudio@gmail.com

Tel +54 9 11 6568 3151

Mariana Sissia —Ramallo, 1980

She holds a degree in Painting from the National University of Rosario (UNR, 1998–2003). She has participated in studio critiques with Ernesto Ballesteros and the Artist Program at Torcuato Di Tella University (2011–2012). In 2013, she was part of the residency at the Banff Centre in Canada. She has held solo exhibitions in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Chicago, and has taken part in group shows and international art fairs in Mexico City, Miami, Barcelona, Lima, Basel, and Bogotá, among others. In 2016, she published Mental Landscape, a book that brings together a significant body of her work. Her practice explores drawing as a zone of encounter between physical action and psychic experience—approaching the technique not as a means of representation, but as a graphic gesture capable of enabling specific states of consciousness, akin to meditation.

Her work is grounded in the gestural tradition of 20th-century art, drawing from Eastern artistic sources. The calligraphic tension, sustained exercises with patterns, and the disciplining of instinct in her drawings resonate with the forms of traditional Chinese drawing. Her visual pieces, charged with mental energy, resist translation into language and suggest delicate, self-contained worlds into which viewers are invited to immerse themselves. This has led her to experiment with unconventional formats, incorporating scrolls as exhibition devices and rice paper as her chosen surface. These formats, widely used in Buddhist cultures, require the viewer to engage in intimate proximity with the work—calling for a fragmented and detailed observation, and a gaze capable of following the forms as they expand, contract, or disappear.