Uncommon Beauty announces solo show of Lara Minerva

Uncommon Beauty Gallery is pleased to inaugurate the gallery’s fall season by celebrating German-Greek artist Lara Minerva at Studio 712, on September 6th, 2019. 

Entitled “Do You See Me?,” the one-night exhibition will present Minerva’s sensual, evocative, and surreal collages, including new works that have never been shown before, as an artistic whole for the first time in the U.S.. To better bring Minerva’s works closer to the audience and encourage conversations with the artist herself, Uncommon Beauty chooses a more intimate artist’s studio space rather than a white box gallery.  

 With a background in art and psychology, Minerva creates collages when her “soul is burning and needs to transform a feeling, a conflict, or a thought into something more expressive and tangible.” Following her intuitive sensibility, she only uses found images and printed photographs, often portraiture, and reassembles them into a different sensational realm. Her works address subjects of conflicts or opposites, usually around objects of desire, freedom, and love. 

The exhibition will feature three series of collages. The first series, “Close/Space” (2017), explores the subtle balance of intimacy and distance between people. The key piece in this series, Do You See Me?, which the whole exhibition is entitled after, questions the closeness and expectations in human relationships. All photographic elements from this series come from Swedish photographer Lena Modigh’s portraiture photos, which the artist regards as “pure and honest.”

Minerva continues her collaboration with Lena Modigh in a recent series entitled “Nostalgia — A Pendulum Between Tenderness and Brutality” (2019). This time, she adds different layers of time and space to her collages while keeping using imagery of body fragmentations to express and capture the bitter-sweet feelings when traveling between reality and memories.

nostalgia 8, 2019

The third series, created this summer, shows Minerva’s very recent transition from figuration to pure abstraction and her experiments with more expressive bold colors. Although most of them are based on black-and-white photos of teenage girls in ballet classes, the scenes are intervened by and dissolve into free, vibrant, colorful abstraction. At the exhibition, this series will be placed in a visual dialogue with a painting by Berlin-based abstract expressionist Taher Jaoui who is Minerva’s early mentor and also an Uncommon Beauty artist. 

Abstract 1, 2019

Lara Minerva, born in 1992, is a Berlin-based artist with a bi-national and bi-cultural German-Greek background. Graduated with a degree in psychology from the Freie Universität Berlin, she started finding her artistic language in collage and has been creating collages since 2015. Her works appear in numerous private collections in Europe and the USA and has been exhibited in Berlin, London and New York City. She was recently featured in RedMilk Magazine and i-D Vice amongst others