2026
ZÄRA MONET
13ThingsLA
January 7, 2026 | By Shana Nys Dambrot
“Monet treats portraiture as a site of self-fashioning, inheritance, and narrative control. Her figures appear cropped and staged within fields of lustrous fabric and jewel-toned ornament, their bodies calibrated through a dense mixology of garment and gesture. The work draws from the long art historical arc of court painting, the female body both armoured and exposed— Ingres’s polish, the disciplines of technique, how politics can be embedded in sartorial richesse—while re-routing that lineage through matriarchal authority, queer temporality, and a knowing excess that belongs to unruly queens as much as to “masters”
- Shana Nys Dambrot