Simona MM
A trans-femme self-portrait inhabits Marilyn Monroe’s pop iconography, turning a monumental face into a spectacle that withholds the gaze it appears to promise.
Curatorial Summary
Against an electric blue ground, a frontal face fills almost the entire canvas. Blonde curls, saturated colour, parted lips, and rhinestone-covered eyes invoke Marilyn Monroe’s visual code while disrupting its promise of availability. The crystals make the eyes the most decorative part of the image and simultaneously prevent any reciprocal gaze. A banana rises through the centre of the composition, cutting across the face as an erotic sign, a comic prop, and a reference to histories of consumption and feminist performance. Rough layers of paint, unstable contours, and flashes of exposed surface unsettle the polished language of pop. In “Simona MM,” hyperfemininity becomes a form of self-construction staged at maximum visibility: the face is offered as an image, while the person within it remains out of reach.
artist
statement
“Simona MM” begins with an act of identification. My name meets Marilyn Monroe’s initials, bringing my own image into contact with a figure that has long functioned as a public script for femininity: desirable, reproducible, adored, and consumed. I enter Marilyn’s visual language through the blonde hair, parted lips, saturated colour, and theatrical glamour. The work holds together the desire to inhabit this image and an awareness of the violence built into its availability.
The banana appears as an already saturated cultural sign, carrying associations with sexuality, pleasure, comedy, and consumption. Its familiarity makes it immediately readable, yet its painted surface interrupts that recognition. Texture, bruising, and friction replace the expected smoothness. Held close to the mouth, the object remains erotic and absurd while acquiring a more unstable physical presence. The bite complicates the relation between appetite, exposure, and control without resolving who or what is being consumed.
The work draws on Warhol’s images of Marilyn as surfaces already shaped by repetition, uneven reproduction, and the conversion of a person into a circulating image. Saturated colour and visual excess return here through a denser, more abrasive materiality. The face resists clean separation from paint, texture, and ornament. Marilyn remains recognizable, though her image becomes entangled with another body and another performance of femininity.
The gesture also recalls Natalia LL’s “Consumer Art,” where pleasure, repetition, spectacle, and objectification remain deliberately difficult to separate. “Simona MM” continues this ambiguity rather than replacing submission with a simple fantasy of domination. The gripping hand and biting mouth intensify the scene, but they do not grant the figure complete control over the conditions of looking. They disturb the viewer’s position and make consumption operate in several directions at once.
Crystals spread across the eyes, making the face more spectacular while obstructing reciprocal sight. Their shimmer attracts attention and blocks access at the same time. The viewer can inspect the figure without receiving confirmation through her gaze. Glamour functions here as a material technology of visibility: it constructs the image, regulates proximity, and preserves a degree of opacity.
Within my trans-femme practice, hyperfemininity is a deliberate construction through which I inhabit and test the codes that make a body recognizable. Artifice and performance become materials of agency rather than signs of an absent authenticity. The wig, colour, crystals, lips, and exaggerated gesture produce femininity as an image that can be desired, manipulated, and inhabited, while never becoming fully available to interpretation.
“Simona MM” remains suspended in the moment of the bite. The image invites proximity through eroticism, glamour, and familiar pop symbols, then interrupts the access they appear to promise. Marilyn persists as fantasy, warning, technique, and companion. The work leaves open whether the figure is consuming the icon, being consumed by it, or holding both processes inside the same glittering mouth.
exhibitions
& events
A record of the exhibition contexts in which this work has appeared.
