Coverage: “Master and Commander” Solo Exhibition by Tania Marmolejo at Volery Gallery, Dubai, UAE

Last December 8th, Volery Gallery opened Master and Commander, a solo exhibition by Swedish-Dominican artist Tania Marmolejo.

Tania Marmolejo works primarily with painting, portraying her experience of womanhood through figures of women with ambiguous facial expressions. Flat surfaces, soft strokes, and vivid oil colours, are the main characteristics of her work. With a background in graphic design and illustration as well as academic training in Fine Arts. Her work is inspired by German and Flemish art of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and the Figurative and Abstract German Expressionism. Influences of Scandinavian art are also apparent in her choice of colours and minimalist subject matter.

For Master and Commander fourteen paintings are on show, dedicated to the bravery of Iranian women in their fight to break the old constraints that have trapped them in a particular place and cultural time. The works subtly investigates and portrays references that have been used historically to demonstrate women’s virtue or the lack of it.

These symbols include ripe fruits, flowing hair, bare skin, and scenes of animal interactions. Women with stories pouring out of their eyes, delivering their emotions through their facial expressions, their figures are captured in fields and indoor spaces playing and questioning these motifs, representing resistance to pre-made fantasies of femininity and womanhood, making them the masters and commanders of their destiny.