Portrait of Manuela Sáenz

Laura Ojeda Bär (b. 1986, Buenos Aires) is a contemporary Argentine visual artist. In 2004, she enrolled at the National University of the Arts (UNA) and in 2014 she began working at the Centro Cultural Kirchner. In 2018 she won Second Prize in the painting category of Salón Nacional and the following year she was chosen to participate in the NES Residency, in Iceland, and in the Artists Program of the Universidad Torcuato di Tella (Argentina). Ojeda Bär has had more than six solo exhibitions and has also participated in several shows as an independent curator.
This painting was commissioned by the IDB as part of a project in which artists from the region were invited to portray female Latin American historical figures. The artwork, which shows Manuela Sáez, the lover and companion of the liberator Simón Bolívar, is full of symbols that recall the couple’s shared history and the last years of Manuelita after Bolívar’s death. The red roses refer to the wreath of flowers that she threw to the hero when she saw him for the first time, parading through the streets of Quito. The medal hanging on the wall corresponds to the Order of the Sun of Peru, which was awarded to her in 1821. Despite all her merits, Saenz was exiled from Colombia and Ecuador, finally settling in Paita, Peru. There, she earned a living selling tobacco and translating letters, both elements in the painting. Moreover, the long epistolary correspondence between Saenz and Bolívar is today one of the main sources of information on the Latin American independence period.