One doesn't need to think too hard to understand why graffiti of male members proliferates in the streets and everyone knows how to draw them, but the same does not happen with their female counterpart. Male sexuality is always present, known and understood how to satisfy, while alternatives remain relegated, even today. Mari Chordà (Amposta, 1942) already had this clear in the 1960s, when she portrayed her first vagina, in the midst of the Franco dictatorship. Vagina (1964) is in a corner of the white room at Macba that has been invaded by her organic, sinuous, and playful forms, full of color and life, close because they describe from within that which is rarely spoken of.
"My body was my model," explains the multifaceted artist, painter, but also sculptor, poet, editor, professor, and, above all, activist. It was the paintings from her series Vaginals that the Tate Modern in London recovered in 2015 in an exhibition on the pop universe, when Chordà began to resonate here again and was remembered, starting to make her visible and dedicate that donanatge to her, as she would say, mixing the words dona and homenatge (woman and homage), which had not yet been done. Since then, little by little, she has been talked about, first with a solo exhibition at the Mayoral gallery in 2021, with calls in the Barcelona and Paris venues, to then arrive at the first major retrospective Mari Chordà... and many other things which can be seen until early January at Macba, curated by Teresa Grandas and coordinated by Guim Camps. As could not be otherwise with Chordà, always very connected to her origins, the exhibition was first seen near her home, at the Museu d'Art Modern de la Diputació de Tarragona.
Approaching abstraction, Chordà studies the female body by portraying her own, self-exploring without shame or obscenity and elevating her sex while ignoring the male gaze that objectifies it, whether to describe how her body changes during pregnancy (Autoretrats embarassada, 1966-1967) or to narrate how she experiences sexuality, free and full of pleasure (Coitus pop, 1968). In a gray Spain that repressed, with women always subjugated to men and hidden in the domestic sphere, her colorful and fluid paintings challenged the morality and order that the artist had already contested when she studied Fine Arts at the "very conservative" Universitat de Barcelona (UB) between 1959 and 1965. She and her classmates demanded that the models they painted also be naked, just as the female models were, a request that fell on deaf ears.
A vindicative career that began with figurative painting, with early works such as when her mother asked her at 13 to paint a virgin for her saint's day, but also engravings or wooden collages with which she looked at the Franco dictatorship, with monstrous animals crushing crowds, dark colors and gray and blue tones that had nothing to do with her more pop explosion when she moved to Paris with her husband. "I have never considered myself a pop artist. The concept of color, the process and my interest in figuration ---at no time realistic--- made pop art one of my references," she clarifies. From this period, according to the exhibition coordinator, the paintings are smaller in size so that they could fit in a suitcase.
The birth of her daughter Àngela was also a source of inspiration when she began to make toy sculptures, works that were also luminous and of manageable dimensions, with which, moreover, one could interact, manipulating them and changing their composition. There they are in the center of the Macba hall, surrounded by her vision of motherhood and sexual relations, without forgetting the paintings she dedicates to bodily secretions, other great forgotten aspects of a femininity that always has to be clean and neat, with Líquids (1966), Llàgrimes (1966) or Dissoldre's (1967/2004).
Mari Chordà's paintings, with which she looked where no one wanted to see, stopped in the mid-seventies, a period in which her feminist activism expanded. She was part of initiatives such as when a group of women mopping the floor interrupted the First Catalan Women's Conference in 1976, a performance very well portrayed by Pilar Aymerich, as can be seen these days at Tecla Sala. Then she was at the feminist bar-library laSal, founded in 1978 in the heart of Raval, buying the premises with bank and family loans. On Riereta street, where the essential Guixot restaurant is now, a space was born where people would go to learn, listen to talks, meet, and have a good time with colleagues, but also offered legal support and medical advice. A year later, the laSal, Edicions de Dones label was founded, operating until the 90s, with publications such as Manuales de salud (Health Manuals) which addressed issues such as menstruation, or L'agenda de les dones (The Women's Agenda), still current today but promoted by another collective. She also wrote, like the poetry collection ...i moltes altres coses (1978) (and many other things) which gives its name to the Macba exhibition and was republished by laSal, Edicions de Dones years later.
If she was a pioneer in the sixties, Chordà became one again from the mid-nineties when she resumed painting and delved into photography, with an absolute change of register, appearing as a completely different artist. This stage is collected in a second room at Macba, where blue predominates, with her paintings of the sea and some aquatic creatures she calls cetaceans. A new context in which the female body also appears, moving from the vindication of its sexuality and freedom to the defense of its innate relationship with the natural environment, very invisible in the capitalist world. She portrays her landscapes of southern Catalonia with pastel colors and reflects women, as in the installation Úter/ou (2017/2024) (Uterus/egg). With the latter, she wants to highlight the microbiologist Lynn Margulis, who discovered a new type of bacteria in the Ebro Delta, spirochetes. She also vindicates them in a 2011 photographic series with a female body bathing in the sea, very similar to the one she did in 2006 and titled Silenci (Silence). For Margulis, Chordà asked that the scientist's name be placed in the square dedicated to her in Amposta, but she did not succeed.