the red from your lips and fingers

24 April - 30 May 2026

Opening: 23 April 2026, 6-8pm

Get up. Early. Have breakfast. Get out. As fast as possible. Arrive. Get coffee. Put on your old clothes.
Sit down. Do nothing, for some time. Take yourself in. There is this immense ten­sion, inside your chest.
Look, as long as you need to. 
Get up. Mix your colors. Think of your colors. 
Grab the paintbrush. Throw your arm.
Make a mark, not a scared and hesitant mark. 
Make more, more, more. Let your hair down.
Start screaming. Puke it out. Burst out.
Push charcoal on your knees. Scream. Puke. Scream. Swear. Just fucking scream it out. 
How can you scream it out on ironed linen? 
When you are done, when your rhythm breaks back 
down again. Stop. Look. Pull back.  
Take a shower. Brush your hair. 
Put on your lacy white skirt. Get out. 
From all your sweat and tears, you will be glowing.
But leave them there.
Don’t go back out with your old clothes.

Dara Maillard
27.09.24
Studio Notes ‍

Drawing on traditions spanning from Eastern and Western Europe—from Christian Orthodox ico­no­graphy, through Renaissance and Baroque painting, all the way to the feminist move­ment—Dara Mail­lard shapes a visual language that explores the cultural meanings at­tributed to the female body. As El­eanor Heartney, the internationally acclaimed New York–based art critic and author, notes in her essay on Maillard: “By choosing to center her work on the fe­male body, she enters into the long and complex history of its representa­tions in art. The fe­male body, and in particular the female nude, has been a cen­tral motif in Western art since the Renaissance. Over the centuries it has embodied a host of often con­tra­dictory meanings, among them purity, sexual availability, depravity, mother love, desire and unbri­dled lust. Over time, such denotations have helped shape women’s roles, possibilities, and social limi­ta­tions.”[1]

By reappropriating archetypes such as the muse, the witch and the hysteric, Maillard reclaims nar­ra­tives shaped by long histories of oppression. Addressing urgent contemporary con­cerns, she ap­proaches art his­tory as a visual archive to be re-read, displaced, and reconfig­ured through an anachro­nistic lens. Born in Bulgaria and raised in Switzerland, her work is further in­formed by a dual cultural perspec­tive. Her Eastern European academic training introduced her to Orthodox iconography, while her studies in Zurich immersed her in the com­plexities of contemporary critical discourse. The conver­gence of these influences results in a body of work that combines social and politi­cal critique with an ethereal visual language that recalls the transcendental aura of traditional icons.

While Maillard’s earlier works engaged more explicitly with art historical imagery, her recent prac­tice shifts toward abstraction and internalization. In her new collages, the body becomes increas­ingly frag­mented, dissolving into gesture and landscape, shifting the emphasis from representa­tion to sensa­tion. Influenced by artists such as Francesca Woodman, Louise Bour­geois, and Carolee Schneemann, Maillard explores the body as a site of lived experience, where anguish and joy coexist through move­ment, material, and mark-making.

Formally, Maillard’s practice is rooted in painting but extends into sculpture, installation, col­lage and printmaking. She incorporates materials such as photo transfers, nails, fabrics, tape, and oxi­dized and engraved metal plates, producing tactile and visceral surfaces. Through this layered interplay of his­tory, material, and sensation, she develops a visual vocabulary that en­gages the complexity of embodi­ment and the shifting meanings of the female body today.

Coming of age in a period marked by shifting conceptions of gen­der, Maillard’s practice does not seek to resolve the contradictions inherent in the rep­resen­tation of the body, but rather to sustain them. The body remains a site of pro­jection and control, of resistance and transformation. By in­habiting this ten­sion, her work creates a space in which historical narra­tives, material processes, and embodied ex­peri­ence intersect, producing an iconography attuned to the instabilities of contemporary subjectivity. Re­ferring to Barbara Kruger’s iconic statement Your Body is a Bat­tle­ground from 1989 Heartney con­cludes in her essay: “The body has remained a battleground for many reasons, not least being the way it is the locus of pleasure as well as pain. From this contra­dictory web of meanings and influences, Maillard is forging an art that embraces the complexity of women’s lives.”[2]

Dara Maillard lives and works in Zurich. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2002, she moved to Geneva in 2007. She received her BA in 2023 and her MA in 2025 from the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. In 2025, she was awarded a grant from the American Foundation for Bulgaria, in col­laboration with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York.

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[1] and [2] Heartney, Eleanor: Dara Maillard - Beyond the Surface, August 2025, commissioned by Ted Vassilev.

Artist website