Portrait 51, after Delacroix’s Women of Algiers
Dinorá Justice, 6’ x 9’, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 2022

Portrait 36, after Manet’s Olympia
Dinorá Justice, 53” x 58”, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 2021

Portrait 56, after Delacroix’s Women of Algiers
Dinorá Justice, 72” x 72”, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 2022

Dinorá Justice

About the Work

I started the Portrait paintings in late 2016, when I was thinking of the biases regarding traditional associations of nature with the feminine. The linguistic heritage of the expression Mother Nature feminizes the environment and gives our patriarchal system permission to extend its logic of subjugation and exploitation to nature, with the disastrous results that are pushing us to the brink of climate catastrophe. In this project I work with iconic female figures of the Western canon by painters such as Matisse and Ingres, from a period in their careers in which they explored a fascination with the exotic Middle East through paintings of odalisques, who were quasi-slave women kept in seclusion. In my 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.

Since 2014, I have been hand-marbling areas directly on canvas and using their organic swirls and veins to echo designs found in nature. In my paintings, patterns created by marbling concentrate on the figure as well as on parts of the landscape, tying those parts together visually and conceptually.

About the Artist

Dinorá Justice is a School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston graduate from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil who currently resides in Massachusetts. You can view her portfolio and learn more at dinorajustice.com.