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Natalia Ariane Hafizi-Marianovich was born on 9 July 1981 in Boulder, Colorado (USA), the only child of Bahman Hafizi and Carmen Marianovich. Bahman is an Iranian born physicist and Carmen, a software engineer, is Uruguayan with Galician and Croatian parent. The family moved to the Washington suburb of Bethesda in 1986. Ariane graduated high school in 1999 and moved to New York City to study art at the prestigious Parsons School of Design, earning a BFA in 2004. She lived in some of New York’s alternative neighborhoods, first on the Lower East Side in Manhattan and then in Brooklyn. She worked on her paintings while also developing a career as a graphic and web designer. She also studied and worked as a bodytalk and reiki provider. With her holistic view of the world, she also practiced yoga, meditation, outdoor sports and swimming.
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In the spring of 2011, she felt the first physical ravages of cancer, which first appeared in her breast, and in 2012 she left New York for Bethesda, where her parents looked after her. From then until her death in January 2015, she stayed in the family home. During those years she continued to work, taking over ownership and management of Icarus Research, Inc. from her father. These were years of contemplation with family and friends, far from the roar of the big city, her time filled with meditating, working, walking and painting. In Bethesda she no longer looked for answers, but found a connection to her-self, began to flow, and let herself be carried away by the beauty of her being and existence, shaping it in these peculiar works. Ariane thus reached that state of great harmony attained only by people who have managed to fully connect with their essential being. From that moment on all her activities in general, and her art in particular, started from that point, from the deepest part of her.
As Ariane progressed on this inner journey, her connection with nature intensified. Her meditations led her to discover, feel and appreciate the beauty of the natural environment, an effect intensified by the long daily walks she took with her mother through the woods surrounding her house. This resulted in works of great harmony that capture the absolute fusion that existed between Ariane and nature. Her extreme sensitivity led her to penetrate it, to feel it in its deepest essence, to free herself from formal appearance and to enter into contact with true mystery.
The cancer, which she defeated several times, continued to reproduce and the negligence and disregard of the secondary effects of the treatment by her doctor, undermined her health. Following a respiratory crisis, she died on January 16, 2015.
Since 2018 her work has been exhibited in Punta del Este, Uruguay (January-March 2018 & 2019). There was a solo exhibition at Juan Risso Gallery in Madrid, Spain, 6 April—11 May 2019, a solo exhibition at the Inter-American Development Bank Staff Association Art Gallery in Washington DC, US, October 3-30 2019, and a solo exhibition at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Art Gallery, Fairfax, Virginia 2020-2021
