Alien Queen/Strange Paradise brings together more than thirty large-scale paintings created over seven years by Manuela Solano (Mexico City, 1987). The exhibition is made up of portraits of real and fictional characters from the pop culture of the turn of the millennium that have become intimately intertwined with the artist’s personal life.

Drawing from her own experiences and painting directly with her hands, Solano revisits the aesthetics of the eighties, nineties, and 2000s, where the local and the global, the alternative and mass culture, intersect. She selects peculiar figures from music and fashion, film and television, the internet and magazines, to revive an imaginary tied to moments from her own biography: adolescence and adulthood, loves and afflictions, parties and calmness.

In this overview, Solano notes: “I lost my sight at the age of 26 due to an HIV-related infection that was negligently treated; since then, visual culture and memory have come together in my practice.” The dense layers of paint that emerge in these works reveal an intimate pictorial process, where memory exposes multiple contrasts and the strokes expose the dilemmas arising both during production and in Solano’s personal life.

The works included in Alien Queen/Strange Paradise operate as a collection of self-portraits. They suggest that identity forged through time and shaped by the interactions and explorations of the world around us. The assumption of different roles enables us to address social challenges and to grow in new directions. In this sense, Manuela Solano understands identity as an act of both survival and subversion, with her work emerging not only from fragility but also from pleasure.

The exhibition invites viewers to recognize themselves in their own youth’s icons and to reflect on the roles they have assumed in the construction of their identities. With humor and irony, Solano proposes a space to laugh at oneself, to imagine other futures, and perhaps to discover our hidden facets.

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