Wynnie Mynerva: Presagio

Fondazione Memmo announces the first solo exhibition in Italy by Wynnie Mynerva (Lima, Peru, 1992). The exhibition, curated by Alessio Antoniolli, features a new body of work created in Rome by the artist while in residency at the Fondazione.

For Mynerva, personal experiences, collective traumas, and individual desires converge within a practice that looks towards renewed perspectives of the past and present, and projects towards a future of hope and openness in the midst of our uncertain times. Engaging with the city and its layered history, Mynerva has conceived a new cosmology, a universe where systems capable of reflecting multiple trajectories come to life through painting.

Dealing with their own experience of living with a chronic disease and guided by the insights of esoteric disciplines and magic to restore people's confidence in their own strengths, Mynerva depicts a body that transcends the simple binary distinction between sick and healthy. This gives life to a cosmic universe where the human being—an holobite, according to Lynn Margulis' definition—is intended as an ecological itinerant entity, connected to everything that surrounds it. Doing so also references the writer Susan Sontag, who describes the body “and its metaphors” as imbued with cultural and political symbols. 

Rather than directly addressing their physical illness, the artist seeks to shape a new way of relating to their environment through coexistence, generating a creative universe that renews the energies of those facing a social illness.

For the artist, the body becomes the fundamental medium through which to communicate a renewed need to reconcile mind and matter, the high and the low. Through an exploration of the relationship between Rome’s history and its most famous fresco cycles, Mynerva creates an immersive environment capable of transporting those who enter it into a new universe. This geography is expressed through a painterly lexicon where body parts proliferate beyond names and labels, inventing fluid anatomies that allude to the body as an integral part of a larger ecosystem. In the exhibition, each body is thus transformed into a system capable of accommodating new inhabitants and scenarios, emphasizing differences and the valorisation of universal coexistence.

For Presagio, Mynerva has laid out the exhibition space of Fondazione Memmo into a narrative journey. In the first room, charcoal drawings on paper introduce figures and twisted bodies caught in light and shadow; while in the second space, the point of view is overturned by four circular canvases arranged as large ceilings rosettes, containing sensual bodies that play at the intersection between body parts and planetary systems. Recreating the digestive, respiratory, nervous and muscular apparatuses and hanging from the ceiling, these canvases shift the vision to a cosmic and divine plane, directing the view to a cobalt blue sky. From these images of contamination and symbiosis, the display ends in the final room, an intimate space in which a series of blown-glass sculptures appear as small shining treasures, recreating amorphous beings, half plants, half animals, half humans.

Four circular canvases that resemble large rosettes cover the ceiling and lift the observer’s point of view. By contemplating the painting, the public is invited visually to a cosmic and divine plane, which transcends the boundaries between organic and mechanical, human and animal. In this way, Wynnie Mynerva creates a microcosm where painting, made of light and shadow and dense layers of colour, manifests openness towards a new future, blending with nature and the universe.