Wynnie Mynerva

Wynnie Mynerva, Reflejo, 2024; Courtesy of the artist and Gathering
Wynnie Mynerva draws on personal experiences of violence tied to race, gender, and sexuality to create a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, performance, and video. Raised in Villa El Salvador on the outskirts of Lima, a place shaped by complex social and economic realities, their work explores themes of transformation, resistance, and embodiment. Referencing mythological iconography, Mynerva both honors and reimagines classical art traditions, inviting reflection on inherited forms and narratives. Their work proposes alternative perspectives with bold imagination and emotional intensity.
Wynnie Mynerva (b. 1992, Lima, Peru) lives and works between Lima and Amsterdam. They are currently a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beedlende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Mynerva’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including The Sweet Nectar of Your Blood at Mayoral, Barcelona; My Weaponized Body at Gathering, London; Presagio at Fondazione Memmo, Rome; The Original Riot at the New Museum, New York; and A Garden of Earthly Delights at Museo Amano, Lima. Their work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Museo de Arte de Lima; C3A, Córdoba; Ill Posto, Santiago de Chile; Sargent’s Daughters, New York; and Pedro Cera, Lisbon, among others. They have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including Pasaporte para un Artista (2020), the Banco Central de Reserva Painting Contest (2019, 2020), the Contemporary Art Award (2019, 2020), and the National Visual Arts Meeting of Trujillo (2018).
Presagio
Fondazione Memmo, Rome, 2024

Installation View
Presagio, 8 May – 3 Nov 2024, Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Ph: Daniele Molajoli; Courtesy of Fondazione Memmo
Presagio, 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.
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.
– Text by Alessio Antoniolli

Wynnie Mynerva, Casiopeia, 2024; Ph: Daniele Molajoli; Courtesy of Fondazione Memmo
My Weaponised Body
Gathering, London, 2024

Installation View
Wynnie Mynerva: My Weaponised Body, Gathering, London; Ph: Ollie Hammick; Courtesy of Gathering
In recent months, a dialogue has emerged that was initially centred around painting, but has quickly transcended the artistic realm to evolve into a broader, more personal reflection on our bodies, now understood as organic wholes, as well as intimate spaces and political territories. These conversations have given rise to essential questions about how we inhabit these bodies, along with all the tensions, stigmatisation, transformations and resistance that come with them.
Having sparked profound examinations of vulnerability, resilience and the signals bodies transmit—suffering, relief, desire, transformation— these discussions have been laden with a constant questioning of the meanings bodies acquire based on gender, within medical, social, and political contexts. These are bodies in a perpetual state of tension, discovering their ability to resist, both individually and collectively. Through monumental paintings that stretch across the exhibition space, inhabiting the gallery like skins peeling off the walls, and a sculpture that extends from one floor to another, Mynerva seeks, as they express, “a personal writing of HIV in my body,” to “name where I am and where I am not, in the dimensions of mental and physical space.” This theme becomes the core of their artistic exploration, which sees the presence of the virus transformed into a language, and the body into a platform that reveals illness, but also uncovers the political and social tensions shaping the experience of disease and its mental and social repercussions.
“To be HIV positive is to be sick with meanings, infected by the assumptions society projects onto my body”, Mynerva notes. Through biopolitics, systems of power oppress HIV positive bodies, assigning the disease a specific meaning that results in the biological being used as a tool for social management.
Drawing on their personal experience, Mynerva’s practice challenges dominant narratives about health and normalcy, creating a space where vulnerability turns into an act of defiance. In this process, the HIV-positive body becomes a territory demanding to be acknowledged and named, transcending the prejudices and stigmas surrounding it. As Silvia Federici clearly states: “Our bodies bear the marks of the pains and joys we have experienced, of the struggles we have fought. Like an open book, bodies speak of oppression and revolt,” becoming places where the forces of social control intersect with individual resistance.
Mynerva’s work highlights how these structures of power not only discipline and marginalise, but also serve to reinforce the hierarchies that shape our lives.
Reflecting on epidemics and health crises, not merely as medical phenomena but as expressions of dominant forms of control and social exclusion inscribed on bodies, is a critical urgency that Paul Preciado has explored deeply in his writings. Revealing the immunitary fantasies of societies—who is protected, who is marginalised, and who is sacrificed—Wynnie Mynerva’s work crafts a poetic space where the intimate and political converge, offering a tool to dismantle the narratives of oppression and stigmatisation.
– Text by María Inés Rodriguez
The Original Riot
The New Museum, New York, 2023

Wynnie Mynerva, Original Riot (I-V), 2023; Ph: Dario Lasagni; Courtesy of The New Museum
For their first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Wynnie Mynerva developed a site-specific installation for the Lobby Gallery. Through a gallery-spanning painting—the largest ever exhibited at the New Museum—alongside a sculptural element created from the artist’s own body, Mynerva reimagins the Biblical origin story of Eve to envision and inspire gender expansive futures.
Born in 1992 on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, Mynerva grew up in an environment rife with violence based on gender, sexuality, race, and social class. Responding to both their traumas and desires, Mynerva creates cathartic visions of revenge and emancipation—representations of a world in which sexual dissidence is praised as powerful political action. Their large-scale paintings depict bodies on the edge of abstraction that refuse to be categorized, consumed, or controlled; and their radical performances and body modifications posit sexual transgression as a path to social transformation.
In this exhibition, Mynerva retells the foundational story of all Abrahamic religions, imagining the encounter between Eve and Lilith as “The Original Riot,” the first alliance between feminized bodies. The seventy-foot-long painting depicts a scene in which Eve gives Lilith her lowest rib bone, commonly called “Adam’s rib,” as a token of their pact against patriarchal power. Drawing on Mynerva’s practice of body modification, the artist will also create a sculptural element made from their own Adam’s rib which they have had surgically extracted for this purpose. With this counter-narrative to patriarchal traditions, Mynerva aims to inspire other feminized and queer bodies to fight collectively for pleasure and freedom.
“Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot” is curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, former ISLAA Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum and current Chief Curator at ISLAA.
Bone of My Bones, Flesh of My Flesh
Gathering, London, 2023

Wynnie Mynerva, Two Bodies Touch on the Same Shore I and II, 2023; Ph: Grey Hutton; Courtesy of Gathering
Wynnie Mynerva’s paintings echo the compositions of Western Old Masters, reimagining themes of male violence, sexual abuse, the gender binary, and patriarchal control. Centuries of phallocentric artwork perpetuate the dynamic of male as active, non-male as passive. Mynerva rejects this standard, informed by personal experiences of sexual trauma and, in a wider sense, by the art historical canon.
Bone of My Bones, Flesh of My Flesh focuses on the binary creation myths of Abrahamic religions. Lilith, a figure from Judaic biblical tradition and Mesopotamian folklore, is Adam’s first wife. Created from the same clay as her male counterpart, she is considered a ‘primordial she-demon’, banished from Eden after refusing to accept subservience to Adam. Certain interpretations of Lilith claim she denied Adam’s requests for her to lay physically under him during sex. Others describe her as consuming her own children in a constant cycle of creation and destruction, patron of still-births and infanticide. The only mention of Lilith within the Old Testament goes as follows:
‘Her nobles shall be no more, nor shall kings be proclaimed there; all her princes are gone. Her castles shall be overgrown with thorns, her fortresses with thistles and briers. She shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches. Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another; There shall the Lilith repose and find for herself a place to rest. There the hoot owl shall nest and lay eggs, hatch them out and gather them in her shadow; There shall the kites assemble, none shall be missing its mate. [...] For the mouth of the LORD has ordered it, [...] It is He who casts the lot for them, and with His hands He marks off their shares of her; They shall possess her forever, and dwell there from generation to generation.’ (Isiah 34:12–18)
She is defined by her spirituality, animism, lust for independence, sentenced to a life without men and left to mother and house the other ‘ungodly’ animals. After Lilith is sent from Eden, God replaces her with the antithetical feminine figure, Eve. Created from the rib of Adam and in debt to him for her very existence, prelapsarian Eve becomes a paradigm of subservience. It is this passage in Genesis from which the exhibition takes its name:
’And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, ’This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (Genesis 2:22–23)

Wynnie Mynerva, Violated Bliss I and II, 2022; Ph: Grey Hutton; Courtesy of Gathering
Although set in opposition from one another, both Eve and Lilith are agents of chaos. Both share an inability as beings to comply with the gender roles prescribed to them, and neither can exist contentedly within the patriarchal paradise constructed by their ‘creator’. The prevalence of these characters within art, condemned to continually serve to visually reestablish traditional conceptions of gender, offers space for reinterpretation.
The exhibition unfolds in three acts. On entering the gallery, two monumental paintings curve around the room, depicting the first act of Mynerva’s epic story: Violated Bliss (I, II). Inspired by Rodin’s Gates of Hell and akin to the complex visual narratives created by Bosch or Michelangelo, the viewer crosses the threshold into a world of colourful, scriptural, sexual chaos. In passing through the gates the second act is revealed, In First Naked Glory. Now shunned from a patriarchal paradise, liquid bodies fly in chaos against one another: an exploration into flesh, gender, skin and bodily liberation.
An overgrown thicket of long, black hair hangs adjacent to these works. To inaugurate the exhibition this swathed Mynerva’s static body, which was suspended for one evening as a sculptural addition to the exhibition. Their naked back was painted with the image of Adam’s rib, and hair cascaded down marking centuries of passed time. Impaled in mid air, they became a symbol of the conquered and forgotten, another character left behind in institutional tradition.
Downstairs, the viewer steps into a womblike pit, dwarfed by vibrant, large-scale paintings facing each other in alliance. This presents the third and final act of Mynerva’s dramatic voyage, Two Bodies Touch on the Same Shore (I, II). Dimly lit and suspended, the canvases drape down to the red vinyl floor, completing an immersive installation of painting/sculpture. Lilith and Eve are situated on either canvas, stripped bare and ascending towards the ceiling. They physically oppose each other and yet, standing together as freed gatekeepers of a new world, bring focus to the parallels within their creation narratives. Lilith and Eve, now fleshy abstracted blends of sexual organs, become ‘haunts’ for lascivious angels, fairies and demons. Each pose as a transformed non-binary archetype, powerful symbols of insurgence.
In Bone of my Bones, Flesh of my Flesh Mynerva offers us the possibility of a new visual narrative, an epic that takes from the past yet insists on drawing us forward.
Closing to Open
Lima, Peru, 2021

Wynnie Mynerva, From the series: Closing to Open, 2021; Courtesy of the Artist
Wynnie Mynerva’s work transits and expands the limits of the flesh, the body, and desire. They does not paint mere fictions but bodily possibilities: as if the brush did not connect with their hand but with their stomach, with their ears, with their uterus, with their tongue, esophagus, intestines and nails. Their paintings are a vibrant extension of their body, and their body is an erotic and synthetic field of plastic exploration. Their pieces are both pictorial and performative. The pigment on the fabric and the plastic operate at the same level as the incisions they decides to make on their skin: both are technologies aimed at disrupting the normative truth of sex and gender. Both allow them to pollute and cross the violent frontiers of sexual binaryism.
Their creative itinerary in recent years reveals a committed and untamed practice, far from a mere hedonistic self-absorption. Their work is the echo of a furious collectivity that refuses to accept patriarchal fantasies and heterosexual paradises shaped by the standard. Their early sculptural research on genital anatomies (“The Other Sex”, 2018) led to an exploration of the political possibilities of the dildo to undo heterosexual contracts (“Sex Machine”, 2019). Their next project was a reckoning of institutionalized misogyny and male authority (“Sweet Castrator,” 2020), painting a series of landscapes where stalkers and predators are hunted and besieged. This also appears in their personal liking for BDSM –and the submission of male bodies–, whose forms of experimentation and sexual play moves towards an intense and expressive painting. Always loaded with autobiographical components, from their work springs the urgency to confront impunity as well as the structure of racial, sexual and class violence that define the contours of the different forms of patriarchal violence.
For their fifth solo exhibition, Wynnie continues to place his body at the center of his practice, albeit this time from a deeply intimate and healing dimension. This exhibition is, first of all, an invitation to celebrate with them the changes that their body has requested. In a world where difference is pathologized and non-normative gender identities are criminalized, any modification that involves disrupting binary signs seems to demand medical or psychiatric explanations - always anchored in a heterosexual perspective. But here there are no justifications because Wynnie does not owe them to anyone. They literally take us to the operating table but to excise the idea of sexuality as a biological fact. The artist decided to close their vagina to open up different possibilities of existing. The closure is actually a grand reopening that allows you to rebuild, acknowledge and reconcile.
– Text by Miguel A. López
Sex Machine
Lima, Peru, 2019

Wynnie Mynerva, From the series: Sex Machine, 2019; Courtesy of the Artist
The sexual alchemy of Wynnie Mynerva
For more than three years Mynerva has developed a political investigation on the plastic possibilities of sexuality and the body. Throughout 2018, Wynnie Mynerva devoted herself to the meticulous production of a material file of sexual organs, translating genitals of various people to polychrome plaster. Her collection of sculptures worked like a reflection on the heterogeneity of the anatomical variants but also suggested the prosthetic dimension of gender. In this project, entitled Sex Machine, her work continues this exploration but taking a leap from the naturalistic representation of sexual differentiation towards a signaling of sexuality as a technology. “This project begins with the introduction of a dildo to my vagina,” explains Mynerva. Like other processes that arise from feminism, the artist developed Sex Machine as a situated investigation that underlines that the production of knowledge cannot be detached from the body on subjectivity of the person who issues it. Her body became a lighting rod of sensations mobilized from her physical relationship with the dildo (different forms of orgasm, new masturbation techniques, recognition of other body power), which exceeded the stimulation of so-called natural sex. Focus attention on the dildo allowed her, first, to rethink and undo the social mandate of the heterosexual contract (and the reproductive logic of the sexual act), and then, to question the false need of male bodies to celebrate sexual pleasure.
Questioning the place of phallic authority (and therefore of men) is not a minor exercise in a context like Peru–the land of misogyny–where women are harassed, assaulted and murdered daily. Mynerva underlines the unnecessary, redundant and replaceable condition of the penis, as if it were a clumsy puppet that has not been invited to the party. In her sculptures and installations the artist rehearses infinite possibilities to turn any element into a sexual object, claiming not only the control of her desires but also locating erotic pleasure beyond the merely genital. Faced with the patriarchal logic that seeks to confine women’s sexuality to the private sphere, theartist opposes a laboratory of dissident excitement through simple and handmade technologies that she joins with her hands.
One of the main pieces of the exhibition is a baby-dildo, with which he held the workshop “How to enjoy your dildo-baby” in 2018. Mynerva reverses the logic of suffering, for satisfaction. With the premise that “if a baby is going to produce pain when leaving, it can give pleasure when entering”, she produces a dildo from plastic baby that disturbs the imaginary purity associated with motherhood. Her inquiries employ different means, such as watercolor, with which she draws a female body turned into a calving machine, but she is not explicit if the babies–represented in a production line–are finally emanated or absorbed. The works even seem to refer to alternative medical practices-other than hospitalization and conventional obstetric preparation–that claim to understand childbirth as a sexual act, where masturbation allows to inhibit the pain of childbirth.
Sex Machine combines objects derived from medical control, sports discipline, fitness culture (and its forms of vigilance on the female body), BDSM culture codes (bondage, domination, submission, masochism), among others, underlining how all these techniques are places that produce subjectivity. In the same way, in their drawings or sculptures the bodies usually appear connected to artisanal tongs, milk pumps, clocks or electrical utensils, building symbiotic landscapes that erase the difference between the human and the technological, between the organic and the inert. The artist challenges the conventional erotic experience usually understood from a purely human and heterosexual logic, inviting us to invent gadgets that induce us of expanding our affective and sensory experiences.
As if she were a sexual alchemist, Mynerva tells us that any second-hand object can become a device for therapy and body re-education, showing us its possibilities of experimentation and collective use. Who enjoys? Seems to be the question that surrounds all these works: the machine, the body, or the dildo?
– Text by Miguel A. López
Wynnie Mynerva
Solo exhibitions
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2025
El Dulce Néctar de tu Sangre, Galeria Mayoral, Barcelona
Wynnie Mynerva, Société, Berlin
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2024
My Weaponised Body, Gathering, London
Omen, Fondazione Memmo, Rome
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2023
Bone of My Bones, Flesh of My Flesh, Gathering, London
The Original Riot, New Museum, New York
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2021
Closing to Open, Lima
Sweet Castrator, Latchkey Gallery, New York
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2020
A Garden of Earthly Delights, Museo AMANO, Lima
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2019
Sex Machine, Lima
El Otro Sexo, Fundación Euroidiomas, Lima
Selected group exhibitions
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2025
Sidario, MACBA, Barcelona
Les Apparitions, Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris
I Sought My Soul, curated by Anneli Botz, St. Elisabeth Kirche, Berlin
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2024
Tierra de Nadie, Il Posto, Santiago de Chile
Open Studios, Rijksakademie, Amsterdam
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2023
Bodies of Resistance, Pedro Cera, Lisbon
Restraint, Sargents Daughter, New York
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2022
Paradiso, with Maria Abbadon, Proyecto AMIL, Lima