Mother/Nature
May 5 – June 3
Opening Reception: Friday, May 5, 5-7PM
Gallery NAGA is pleased to announce an exhibition of highly anticipated new paintings by Brazilian-born painter Dinorá Justice.
Dinorá Justice: Mother/Nature is on exhibit from May 5 through June 3. A reception for the artist and public will be held at the gallery on Friday, May 5 from 5 to 7 pm. A conversation between Justice and Michelle Millar Fisher, Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston will take place at Gallery NAGA on Thursday, May 11 at 5:30 pm. RSVP to mail@gallerynaga.com.
Justice begins her process by employing traditional marbling techniques to create a surface design on her canvas. This marbled area, full of swirling, intricate patterns, becomes the jumping off point for her complex oil paintings. Justice’s figures set in landscapes are all based on paintings done by men. The historical paintings pose the women nude and objectified; Justice, however, transforms them through her use of pattern and color. The female figure becomes an object of power, no longer just one of desire.
Her newest body of work and the work to be shown at NAGA centers around her Odalisque series and the relationship between women and nature. In Justice’s artist statement, she explains,
“For the past six years I have been working with iconic art historical images of women to articulate a connection between environmental problems and gender power relations. My work takes images of women made by and, largely, for men from the canon of Western art (such as the Venus of Urbino and La Grande Odalisque) and re-contextualizes them in an eco-feminist frame. I use a combination of oil painting and hand-marbling on canvas, in which the intricate organic patterns obtained with marbling are isolated into abstracted forms of the (usually supine) women of the historical paintings. I substitute trees, plants, and flowers for drapery and furniture, forcing a visual relocation of the female form from the realm of the intimate to that of the universal. The style resembles that of collage and is highly and purposefully decorative, celebrating the femininity and creativity of marginalized processes and aesthetics. I also rely heavily on patterns, colors, and geometric compositions to achieve a sense of abundance and harmony. The celebratory energy of my paintings serves to underline my belief that women and nature must be seen as beneficial sources of life, and that the age-old contempt of the patriarchy for everything it deems “weak” wreaks havoc on the planet and all its living creatures.”
Justice was the recipient of the Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Painting in 2022 and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University Traveling Fellowship in 2020, the latter leading to a solo exhibition of new work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in November of this year.
Images of the work can be seen at gallerynaga.com