Opening Preview: November 6, 2025 | 6 – 8 PM
On View: November 7, 2025 – January 17, 2026
November 4, 2025 (Berlin, Germany) – SOCIÉTÉ is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with Wynnie Mynerva, the artist’s first in Germany. Wynnie Mynerva draws upon personal experiences of violence tied to race, gender, and sexuality to create a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, performance, video, and body modifications. 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.
In Dust of Love, their inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Mynerva delves into one of humanity’s oldest fabulations—love. Transforming the gallery into an immersive textile installation, they present a series of paintings that probe the traditional foundations of love and reconfigure normative conceptions of the body and sexuality. Describing the act of painting as a “living process” and a “document of thinking and feeling,” Mynerva utilizes the pictorial medium to defy and transcend the semantic boundaries of Western theories about love, exposing the fundamental absence on which they rest.
A large oil painting provides the focal point of the exhibition—a narrative exploration of love through multiple scenes charged with desire and surrender. Mynerva’s representation of love draws upon their personal experience of the legacies of colonialism and the Catholic faith in Peru, expanding on the artist’s ongoing critique of how religious dogma and colonial interference govern the experience of sexuality, desire, and the body.
Multiple encounters unfold across the central canvas. One scene depicts sexual union, reframed by Mynerva as a myth—“a desperate attempt to become one.” Another vignette showing a body dwelling within a larger, translucent form evokes the philosophical idea of love as inscription, a shaping and imprinting of an individual’s identity. A figure infatuated with its own reflection alludes to the canonical allegory of Narcissus, while two bodies, facing each other, engage in a spoken exchange of affection and love. With its allusion to the compositional logic of the Old Masters, the painting’s poly-narrative cosmos offers an alternative interpretation of love as a collective, cathartic event that carries anguish, despair, and illusion. By applying deeply evocative visceral and emotional motifs, Mynerva fractures Western narratives about love not as a means of depicting how the traditional dramatic register of romance shapes our social lives, but rather to expose an inherent absence—emphasizing how the rhetorics of love function as a structure of lack.
Attending these entwined, ecstatic bodies is a series of four smaller, vertical paintings of women who witness the scene. Independent and self-contained, these figures stand as agents of their own narratives. Each holding a weapon or marked by a wound, their bodies carry the duality of victimhood and power, echoing Mynerva’s private forms of resilience and self-determination. In its staging of absence and witnessing, Mynerva’s expressive realm offers a painterly articulation of what cannot be said, filling the void with speculation: what remains of love when the image collapses? When the body no longer responds to the illusion of completeness, and only pleasure, the gaze, and yearning remain?
NOTES TO EDITORS
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About Wynnie Mynerva:
Wynnie Mynerva (b. 1992, Lima, Peru) lives and works between Lima and Amsterdam. They are currently a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende 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).
About SOCIÉTÉ:
SOCIÉTÉ is a Berlin-based contemporary art gallery with a global reach. The gallery’s bold curatorial approach plays a pivotal role in advancing its artists’ visions, supporting major museum exhibitions, biennials, and acquisitions by leading institutional collections worldwide. Operating in both the primary and secondary markets, SOCIÉTÉ provides curated advisory services to select clients.
Beyond its exhibitions, the gallery’s publishing initiative, EDITION SOCIÉTÉ, collaborates with prominent writers and graphic designers to produce artist books, catalogues, and, more recently, high-end artist editions.
SOCIÉTÉ is an active presence at major international art fairs, including Art Basel, Art Basel Paris, Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze New York, Frieze London, ARCOmadrid, and Gallery Weekend Berlin.
Image Credits:
1. Wynnie Mynerva, 2025. Photography by Denis Druz. Courtesy of the artist and SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin.
2. Detail of painting by Wynnie Mynerva, 2025. Photography by Felix von der Goltz. Courtesy of the artist and SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin.