Cape Town-born, New York-based artist and interior designer Marie-Louise Koen launches her first solo exhibition, Faces of a Woman, on behalf of her brand llounique by MLK.
Drawing inspiration from her personal narrative – one that has led her to develop stages of her womanhood across two continents – Koen chooses to express a collection of her own deeply felt emotions and memories through her artwork.
Recalling moments of her past, Koen uses the faces of female subjects to depict a number of memories and their associated emotions: some that are, at times, too difficult to express physically or feel emotionally, and others that are too hard to hide.
Each piece depicts a face, and each face depicts an emotion. With this, Faces of a Woman represents a spectrum of emotions, responses, reactions and reflections, all within one collection.
While layering her own narrative with that of the subject matter, Koen invites the viewer to inspect deeper levels of her art, seeing the body of work evoke a particular emotional response from the viewer - one that invites them to become aware of their own emotional core and its attendant associations.
Through this collection, Koen aims to show how each woman, regardless of differences in appearance or personality, is able to share in a series of collective emotions at various stages throughout their independent lives. Through this unification, Koen also aims to change the conventions around emotional expression, and too, aims to add to the discourse that encourages women to both express themselves and become deeply in tune with themselves.