BRUSSELS.- Maruani Mercier is presenting Echoes of Her, a group show at its Brussels gallery. With this exhibition, the gallery aims to explore the multifaceted nature of womanhood by examining its complexity through a diverse selection of works by; Cornelius Annor, Kwesi Botchway, Louise Bourgeois, Jaclyn Conley, Francesco Clemente, Michael Dweck, Esiri Erheriene-Essi, Eric Fischl, Kate Gottgens, Joan Jonas, Titus Kaphar, Alex Katz, David LaChapelle, McDermott & McGough, Toiletpaper, Andy Warhol and Sue Williams. In Echoes of Her, seventeen artists, each shaped by distinct cultural, geographical, and personal perspectives, reflect on the layered intricacies of womanhood across different lived realities and social landscapes.
Including painting, photography, sculpture, and mirrored works that at times quite literally implicate the viewer, the exhibition brings forth meditations on identity, visibility, and the shifting roles women inhabit. How are women perceived in society? And more importantly, how do they see themselves, beyond inherited expectations, projected archetypes, or prescribed narratives?
Echoes of Her takes an engaged stance, stepping away from depictions of womanhood in a limited and singular way, shaped largely by narrow, dominant perspectives. It questions long-held assumptions about the female condition, invites us to look again, and differently, at the images we’ve inherited, and considers how portrayals by both female and male artists can contribute to a more complex, layered understanding of what it means to be a woman. A nuanced dialogue emerges not only between the artists and their subjects, subtly engaging with the legacy of the (male) gaze and the power dynamics embedded in representation, while embracing the richness of self- determined representation.
In Night Giant, Jaclyn Conley places a monumental female figure within a pastoral landscape that recalls 18th-century astronomical scenes. Her protagonist gently eclipses the setting; her sheer presence unsettles ideals of scale, ambition, and visibility. These women do not merely dwell within the landscape, they transform it. In MOSCOW (Nature’s Naked Loveliness), David LaChapelle presents a theatrical tableau where idealized femininity is both celebrated and critiqued. Hovering between embellishment and concealment, the work probes the legacy of the male gaze with irony and intensity. In The Surprise, Esiri Erheriene-Essi gently upends dominant narratives, revealing the quiet dignity, rich nuance, and resilient agency of Black womanhood. Her figures, neither idealized nor monumentalized, are rendered with tenderness, care, and quiet strength, rooted in domestic settings, steeped in memory, and shaped by diasporic experience.
Echoes of Her invites us to consider how images resonate beyond the frame, how they shape, challenge, and echo the lived experiences of those they seek to portray. Ultimately, it is a celebration of the multiplicity of womanhood: fractured and whole, visible and obscured, defined only on one’s own terms.
