Mara Harbon

Mara Harbon is a painter born in Los Angeles from a French/Iranian background. She moved to Antwerp in 2019 to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

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She approaches painting in the mode of emergence.

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Each piece begins as a kind of psychic archaeology: excavating fragments of myth, memory and psychology, and re-staging them into a composition. However her intention is not to heal these fragments into “wholeness”, or unify them into a single truth. Rather, the paintings become “palimpsests,” where repurposed forms compete for visibility, sometimes slipping back beneath the surface, revealing traces of a struggle.

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She acknowledges fragmentation as a more honest expression of identity, grief and desire, without denying longing for wholeness. This can be seen in the way that each work craves for resolution while simultaneously avoiding it. Instead, perpetually quivering between concealment and exposure, vulnerability and masks, stories and confessions.

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In her work the cathartic act is the rejection of closure; which ultimately admits that resolution is secondary to the essential urge to express.

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