Wynnie Mynerva

Wynnie Mynerva (they/them) draws from personal experiences of violence based on race, gender and sexuality, prevalent in Villa El Salvador on the outskirts of Lima, where Mynerva grew up. Dogged by social and economic struggle, omnipresent crime and exploitation, Villa El Salvador provides an important context for the visions of emancipation and revenge that dominate Mynerva’s canvases. Spanning painting, performance and video, their practice seeks to explore the bodily aspect of human experience in all of its nuances. Mynerva’s paintings depict convoluted bodies in a state of constant flux, refusing to be defined or contained. While extremely tactile and expressive, their painting practice extends far beyond pure figuration. Oscillating masterfully between abstraction and representation, Mynerva finds new ways to visualise the complexities of identity and desire. Mynerva is known for their large-scale paintings; the biggest of which, roughly 21 meters in length, was unveiled at the New Museum in June 2023. The monumentality of their painting work, as well as its transcendental charge, is evocative of the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque - bastions of the Western art historical canon.

By referencing historical and mythological iconography and echoing the methods and compositions of the Western Old Masters, Mynerva pays homage to the classical art education which shaped their practice, while also subverting the high-art traditions which have so long affirmed the white male figure in its position of absolute power. Wynnie Mynerva seeks to reject this standard, informed by personal experiences of sexual trauma and, in a wider sense, by the art historical canon. This is a radical thesis in a community such as Lima, Peru, where Mynerva lives and works. By decentralising the male body as an essential element of female pleasure and inverting the dynamic of the male voyeur/female subject, they reassign power in typically binary gender dynamics, affording themselves agency both in their own sexuality and their relationship with the patriarchal culture in which they were raised.