Wynnie Minerva
Confrontaction, 2024oil on canvas220 x 180 cm
About the work
Wynnie Mynerva is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, performance, and video, rooted in personal experiences of systemic violence tied to race, gender, and sexuality. Growing up in Villa El Salvador, a marginalized district on the outskirts of Lima, Mynerva draws from a harsh social reality shaped by poverty and exploitation to create powerful visions of emancipation, resistance, and bodily transformation.
Their large-scale paintings are known for their emotional intensity and physicality, portraying shifting, uncontainable bodies that blur the lines between abstraction and figuration. Evocative of Renaissance and Baroque frescoes, Mynerva’s monumental works reimagine Western art traditions through a deeply personal, politicized lens.
In their exhibition "My Weaponised Body" at Gathering London (2024) continues this exploration. Emerging from intimate dialogues around embodiment, the project delves into how our bodies function as sites of vulnerability and strength, personal spaces shaped by desire, pain, stigma, and resistance. Mynerva confronts us with the body as a deeply charged, political territory in constant flux.
In their solo show "El Dulce Néctar de tu Sangre" at Galeria Mayoral (2025), Mynerva explored blood as a symbol, physically and culturally, investigating themes of purity, infection, and colonial legacy. The work reflects on their experience as a non-binary, HIV-positive, racialized migrant body, engaging with questions of identity, stigma, and transformation.
Wynnie Minerva
b. 1992 Lima, Peru. Lives and works partly in Lima and Amsterdam (the Netherlands).
Solo and group exhibitions: The Sweet Nectar of Your Blood at Mayoral (Barcelona, Spain), My Weaponized Body at Gathering (London, UK), Presagio at Fondazione Memmo (Rome, Italy), The Original Riot at the New Museum (New York, USA), and A Garden of Earthly Delights at the Museo Amano (Lima, Peru). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as MALI Colecciones. Adquisiciones y donaciones (2019–2023), Museo de Arte de Lima; Territorios: Arte Contemporáneo Latinoamericano en la Colección Jorge M. Pérez at the Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía; Tierra de Nadie at Ill Posto (2023), among others.
She has been a finalist for several awards, including Pasaporte para un Artista (2020), the Banco Central de Reserva Painting Contest (2019 and 2020), the Contemporary Art Award (2019 and 2020), the Visual Arts Award Salon, and the National Visual Arts Meeting of Trujillo (2018). In 2024, she was selected to participate in the Rijksakademie residency program, where she was pursuing her studies.
Portfolio
