Fremin Gallery brings together five artists in True Beauty, a group exhibition that looks at how ideas of beauty shift when viewed through personal experience rather than fixed standards. On view from June 4 to July 12, the show features works by Lauren Camara, Reka Nyari, Mercedes Jelinek, Leila Massenet and Daisy Seilern, each approaching the subject from a different angle and medium.
The exhibition spans photography, painting, collage and mixed media, offering a range of visual languages. Some works focus on the body and portraiture, while others move toward abstraction or material-based processes. Across these approaches, beauty appears less as an ideal to reach and more as something shaped by lived experience. Imperfections, marks of time and emotional intensity are not hidden but emphasized, giving the works a direct and sometimes raw quality.
Several artists address how identity is constructed and perceived. Reka Nyari, known for her portrait photography, often centers female subjects in ways that highlight strength and individuality rather than conventional glamour. Lauren Camara and Mercedes Jelinek incorporate layered or fragmented imagery, suggesting that identity—and by extension beauty—is not singular or stable. In other works, materials themselves carry meaning, with reused or altered elements pointing to transformation and resilience.
Themes of memory, displacement and personal history run throughout the exhibition. References to nature, the body and domestic space appear as recurring motifs, linking internal experience with external environments. This connection grounds the work in everyday reality, moving away from idealized representations and toward something more immediate and relatable.
True Beauty positions beauty as something that evolves over time and differs from one perspective to another. By focusing on individual narratives and varied techniques, the exhibition presents a broader view of what beauty can represent in contemporary art, shaped as much by emotion and experience as by appearance.
Image: Mercedes Jelinek. Immersion: Day #33, 2023 © Mercedes Jelinek



