9 March - 5 May 2019
No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to present ‘The beauty one cometh’ the first solo exhibition by Marilyn Sonneveld. The artist presents a new series of work in which she studied the representation of the female body by focussing on beauty, femininity and its manipulation and distortion.
The beauty one cometh is the definition of the name of Nefertiti, the Royal Wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. The famous limestone bust of Nefertiti has made her one of the most known woman of the ancient world; the icon of feminine beauty. Throughout the years, the bust of Nefertiti has been represented as such to disguise her missing eye by working with en-profile documentation and shadowing. Marilyn Sonneveld took these obscured deviations of female beauty as a point of departure for her solo exhibition.
The artist presents a series based on eight renowned paintings such as The Venus of Urbino by Titiaan, Venus and Mars by the School of Fontainebleau and Young Woman at her Toilette by Bellini next to works which show female figures found on social media that are distorted, camouflaged and manipulated either by the source or the artist. The series are placed in a site-specific context filled with images which by repetition and zooming in become more and more abstract and unfamiliar.
In the exhibition the eye is the spectator, scattered around the gallery. We are embedded by beauty ideals and hyperreal images. The own eye is by definition a filter – an algorithm is not only imposed on us, but grows within ourselves.
Marilyn Sonneveld (1990, NL) is a visual artist based in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam in 2013. Her practice centers around sexuality, femininity and flowers in illustration and printing techniques. Sonneveld is the co-founder of Wipsite a novel and contemporary form of sexual education in form of animation and illustration.
Photo credits: Neeltje de Vries