Posted on
2026-06-22
Zoé Bernardi’s exhibition “I wanna be loved by you” explores the way femininity is constructed, transmitted and transformed through images. Borrowed from Marilyn Monroe’s song, the title offers from the outset a compelling tension: that of a femininity at the same time desired, manufactured and projected. How to construct oneself as a woman through the images that precede us, flow through us and at times, assign us a role to play?
It all began with Marilyn Monroe. Discovered on television in childhood, her image generated an immediate confusion: fascination, distance, impossibility to match. Marilyn became much more than an icon of Hollywood cinema. She acted as a matrix for femininity, an industrial model that could be reproduced and multiplied to infinity. An image that is disseminated, repeated, distorted, and from which other figures are generated. The exhibition opens on a gesture of embodiment: a self-portrait in which the artist makes herself up as Marilyn. With that gesture a shift is initiated: that of a body that confronts an image already formed, an archetype of femininity. Made by photoengraving and in several assembled panels, the image plays on the confusion between the apparition of an icon and the presence of the artist.
Alongside that image, photographs of teenagers remind us how the issue of the construction of the self is fashioned and fed very early on by images and representations of the feminine. With that realisation, the exhibition takes us on a journey between several embodiments of femininity.
Opposite – Are you a Marylin?, 2026
Exhibition runs through to July 25th, 2026
Mennour
5, rue du Pont de Lodi
75006 Paris
France
mennour.com
