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Sunday 16 February

Wynnie Mynerva: Revolutionizing Pictorial Art

Published on: 10 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 6 minutes

In her monumental canvases, Wynnie Mynerva creates a new visual language where bodies metamorphose, transcending gender norms and patriarchal structures to reach an explosive political dimension.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, while I tell you about Wynnie Mynerva, born in 1992 in Villa El Salvador, on the outskirts of Lima. If you think you’ve seen it all in contemporary art, think again. Here is an artist who does not settle for painting pretty pictures to decorate your sterile living rooms.

While transgression has become just another commodity, Mynerva achieves the feat of truly shaking us. Not with gratuitous provocations, but with a visceral approach rooted in her personal experience, the systemic violence she has endured, and her rebellion against gender norms and patriarchal structures. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”—Mynerva goes further by demonstrating that this social construct can also be undone, shattered into a thousand pieces on her monumental canvases.

Take her exhibition The Original Riot at the New Museum in 2023. A fresco over 21 meters long—the largest ever exhibited at the institution—that rewrites the biblical myth of Eve and Lilith. But beware, this is not a simple feminist reinterpretation designed to please gender theorists. No, Mynerva pushes the performance to the extreme by surgically removing one of her ribs—the so-called “Adam’s rib”—and integrating it into the artwork. This gives new meaning to the expression “putting one’s body into art”. As Susan Sontag warned in Against Interpretation, art must be a sensory experience before an intellectual exercise. Mynerva understands this perfectly, making her body both the subject and medium of her work.

The first defining feature of her work is her unique approach to corporeality. Her paintings do not simply depict bodies; they are bodies. Masses of flesh that overflow the frame, organs that seem to pulse on the canvas, limbs that intertwine to form new creatures. It’s Francis Bacon meeting Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but with an explosive political dimension. Judith Butler, in Bodies That Matter, theorized gender performativity. Mynerva takes it further, creating a pictorial performativity where the canvas itself becomes a body in transition, a space of perpetual metamorphosis.

At the Fondazione Memmo in Rome in 2024, she offers a poignant meditation on chronic illness with Presagio. The four monumental ceiling paintings—Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Hydra, and Berenice—each measuring 330 by 340 centimeters, transcend individual suffering to achieve a cosmic dimension. By appropriating the ancient concept of melothesia, which links body parts to constellations, she transforms vulnerability into creative strength. This aligns with Georges Canguilhem’s assertion in The Normal and the Pathological that illness is not merely a deviation from the norm but another way of being in the world.

The second hallmark of her work is her ability to subvert classical painting codes while mastering them perfectly. Trained at the National School of Fine Arts in Peru, she knows the old masters by heart. But instead of blindly revering them, she cannibalizes, digests, and transforms them. Her series Violated Bliss (2022) dialogues with Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents while overturning its patriarchal perspective. The bodies she paints are no longer passive objects of the male gaze, as Laura Mulvey analyzed in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. No, they are active, desiring, sometimes violent subjects.

In her exhibition My Weaponized Body at London’s Gathering Gallery in 2024, Mynerva deepens her exploration of the body as a site of political resistance. Following her HIV diagnosis, she transforms what could be seen as stigmatization into a powerful affirmation of self. These new works on raw, unstretched canvas—sometimes densely populated with organic forms, sometimes left nearly bare—evoke flayed skin. Our bodies bear the marks of the joys and pains we’ve experienced, the battles we’ve fought. Mynerva makes this bodily inscription the driving force of her creation.

Her treatment of pictorial material is revolutionary. Pigments seem to bleed on the canvas, creating areas of variable density reminiscent of organic tissues under a microscope. In Transmutacion (2024), purplish and brown brushstrokes construct a muscular calf or supple belly before dissolving into shapeless masses of pewter-gray. This recalls Julia Kristeva’s theories on the abject, yet Mynerva goes beyond provocation to create a new visual grammar of the diseased body.

Her sculptural installation Hueso (2024), a spine crafted from resin, fiberglass, and polyurethane winding across two gallery floors, interacts with the paintings like a skeleton with its flesh. This work echoes Michel Foucault’s reflections on the body as a site of power inscription and potential resistance. For Mynerva, the HIV-positive body is not defeated but defiant, refusing to submit to societal imperatives of shame and silence.

Her references to Lilith, Adam’s first wife cast out of Eden for refusing sexual submission, gain new resonance here. In the Abrahamic tradition, Lilith is demonized, sexualized, fetishized—just as non-conforming bodies are today. But Mynerva turns her into a symbol of resistance, a tutelary figure for all marginalized bodies.

What is fascinating about Mynerva is her ability to maintain a precarious balance in her works—between beauty and violence, seduction and repulsion. Her pieces are stunning yet deeply unsettling. She masterfully employs what Roland Barthes called the “punctum”—the detail that disrupts the tranquil “studium” reading of an image. A black lacquered nail jutting from a mass of flesh, a pair of bloody kidneys emerging from a gray background, a headless torso with perfect breasts—all elements that puncture our comfortable perception.

The power of her work lies in its transcendence of traditional dichotomies: interior/exterior, male/female, healthy/sick. As Donna Haraway, whom Mynerva frequently cites, writes, viruses blur the clear distinction between “internal” organisms and “external” agents. Mynerva achieves the same with her painting, creating works that are simultaneously surfaces and depths, skins and viscera.

Her glasswork at the Fondazione Memmo exemplifies this approach. The Tesoros sculptures, created in collaboration with a Venetian glass master, use breath as a medium—a subtle nod to the divine act of giving life in Genesis. But here, the breath creates ambiguous forms, neither wholly organic nor artificial, challenging our usual categories of perception.

There is something profoundly revolutionary about Mynerva’s approach to chronic illness. Instead of viewing it as a pathogenic invasion to be fought, she sees it as a complex ecosystem to coexist with. This resonates with Paul B. Preciado’s work on pharmacopornography, but Mynerva takes it further, creating a true aesthetic of cohabitation with the virus.

Superficial critics might say her work is too literal, too corporeal, too political. But that is precisely its strength. In a frequently disembodied art world, Mynerva reminds us that our bodies are political battlegrounds, sites of resistance and transformation. As Audre Lorde wrote, “Your silence will not protect you”. Mynerva breaks those silences with explosive force.

Her use of scale is particularly noteworthy. When she paints these immense canvases that occupy entire rooms, she is not merely aiming to impress. She creates immersive environments that physically confront the viewer with the work. This embodies Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “flesh of the world”—the fundamental interconnection between the perceiving body and the perceived world.

I see in Mynerva’s work the emergence of a new form of corporeal art that transcends traditional boundaries of genre. She is not merely an artist who paints bodies or uses her body as a medium. She creates a new visual language that captures the corporeal experience in all its political and existential complexity. This is exactly what contemporary art needs: less postmodern cynicism, more flesh, blood, and conviction.

So yes, you can keep marveling at your tidy little paintings that disturb no one. But know that while you’re doing so, Wynnie Mynerva is reinventing painting, pushing the limits of what art can say and do—with an urgency and authenticity sorely lacking in today’s art world.

Reference(s)

Wynnie MYNERVA (1992)
First name: Wynnie
Last name: MYNERVA
Gender: Female
Nationalitie(s):

  • Peru

Age: 33 years old (2025)

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