Gathering is delighted to participate in Zona Maco for the first time with a solo booth of work by Wynnie Mynerva. Mynerva is presenting two oil paintings for the Ejes section of the fair, curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, Chief Curator at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, New York. For this edition, Mosqueira asked galleries to critically and poetically interrogate freedom and its relationship to art.
Mynerva’s paintings, The Fall I and The Fall II, are a Baroque monument to subversive sensuality, recasting the biblical doctrine of The Fall - the descent from innocence to disobedience - as a moment of irrepressible embodiment. Each work is representative of Mynerva’s practice as a whole, which explores themes of resistance, transformation and embodiment and draws on personal experiences of violence tied to race, gender and sexuality.
Mynerva invokes the doctrine of The Fall in her titles, a reference to a biblical interpretation of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve are tempted into eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden, resulting in their expulsion from the Garden of Eden and a life of mortality and shame. Often conceptualised as original sin, or evil passed down to all of humanity, Mynerva’s paintings explore and reimagines the idea of sin entering the world through the act of disobedience.
Contortions of figures intertwine with one another and convey a gestural swirl of recognisable anatomical parts, iconography and hues of purples. Brushstrokes that surge and ripple from the edges of the canvas inward provide a sumptuous mosaic of bodies in motion. Colour shifts from The Fall I to The Fall II, imbued with more orange and red tones that suggest humanity’s transformation from immortal to mortal, innocent to condemned. With these techniques, Mynerva both honours and reimagines classical art traditions, inviting reflection on inherited forms and narratives.
