Marianne van Roode is a Dutch-born visual artist living in Granada, Spain, since 1995. Her work explores the shifting tension between structure and spontaneity — between what’s visible, what’s remembered, and what escapes definition.
She studied Interior Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam (now Willem de Kooning Academy), graduating in 1994 with a visual study on ornament and sensory overload — inspired by her exchange semester at the University of Granada and the intricate geometries of the Alhambra — and a thesis titled Life’s a Stage, which explored the creative process through four key figures: Robert Wilson, Rem Koolhaas, Alfred Hitchcock, and Peter Greenaway.
For over two decades, Marianne worked as a graphic and web designer, combining visual thinking with conceptual rigor. Among other initiatives, she organized two workshops with designer Fernando Medina titled Las Ideas Primero (Ideas First). Later, she took a detour into the corporate world, where she grew into the role of Business Analyst in a multinational HR environment — absorbing design thinking, user interface design, and cross-cultural dynamics.
But the urge to create never left. Over the years, it whispered through collages, cards, furniture, and sketches. In 2021 it began to murmur more intensely when she returned to painting, and in 2023 it became a full inner calling. She worked for a year under the weekly mentoring of Spanish painter David Conde. In May 2024, she left behind her corporate career to fully embrace the unknown: a life in painting.
Her current body of work — a series of acrylic paintings — reflects a layered journey: from figuration to abstraction to poetic symbol. Each piece is a sensory echo of transformation. From a falling leaf to a tiger behind its stripes, from silence to light.
Her work maps out the tensions between order and chaos, permanence and change, memory and repetition. Through painting, collage, and material gesture, she traces an intuitive cartography of lived experience — what remains when everything else shifts.
Marianne believes in the slowness of looking. In the intimacy of surfaces. In the kind of art that doesn’t explain, but resonates.
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