When the painter is her own muse

By chance, I happen to be walking past the new Anna Helwing Gallery in District 4 and am drawn to the female nude in the shop window. I want to go into the gallery, but the door is locked. Then I read that the gallery is only open on Fridays and Saturdays. A woman behind a wooden table at the far end of the room notices me and comes forward. She, Anna Helwing, kindly opens the door for me and lets me in, despite it being outside opening hours.

The large-scale nude self-portraits by Dara Maillard, born in Sofia in 2002 and raised in Switzerland, oscillate between intimacy and performance. The canvases are painted in oil in soft, gestural strokes in flesh tones. Pink, milky white and pale grey blend into one another with a sketchy brushstroke; occasionally greenish tones and plant-like forms appear. The large works are titled: Landscape (Landscape 2, 3 & 4). In places, the bodies scrape at their own edges, yet do not dissolve. Gestures allude to strong emotions and physical states. The painting remains calm and controlled. A tension arises here.

Maillard rejects the ironic distance from the beautiful image that is often expected in art today. Her self-portraits display, relatively directly and unashamedly, the privilege of youth, whiteness and attractiveness. Milk spurts from a breast, hair falls softly into the green, a slender body kneels down, hands circling around the head. The artist’s face is reserved for the paintings and is rarely to be found throughout the exhibition. Where it does appear, it captures my attention.

Just like a landscape painting, the female nude is never neutral. A landscape has a clear geographical context, complete with associated rights, possibilities, prohibitions and so on. The female nude exists within the art-historical context of a male gaze, an inscribed passivity, an imposed desirability and a market value. An image can reproduce stereotypical femininity whilst simultaneously reflecting upon it. Maillard’s images do not attempt to directly criticise or circumvent ideals of beauty. Instead, they consciously work with them. This makes the works delicate, yet interesting.

It is striking that all the figures depicted are self-portraits. Maillard does not simply paint female bodies; she paints her own body, thereby controlling its image and value, and, to a certain extent, its circulation. She assumes the dual role of artist and muse. As a result, the images appear less like classical nudes intended for the gaze of others, and more like a conscious form of self-presentation. Maillard liberates the muse from her historical attribution as a passive figure, and creates an active female subjectivity. She goes even further and, through motifs, alludes to other figures embodying this female subjectivity. This can be seen in the example of ‘Milk Spraying from the Breast’, where the figure also suggests the role of nurturer/mother.

I am struck by the signatures on her prints. At a time when many young artists tend to present themselves in a rather detached or referential manner, Maillard clearly emphasises her authorship against the zeitgeist—not yet on the canvas, but on paper. The signature marks ownership: my body, my image, my surface. Her work thus appears less as an intimate account than as a conscious economy of her own fetish value. Youth, beauty, but also vulnerability and psychological openness are not concealed, but put to productive use.

Maillard uses her body as material for her work and places it within the production of value. This can be both good and bad; fundamentally, it lends the work an ambivalence that personally appeals to me. Maillard writes her working process like a manifesto in the imperative. Strong words appear such as: ‘Scream. Puke. Swear.’ In the paintings, this rawness appears much more subtle than in the language. It manifests itself where pink becomes slightly dirty, where grey creeps into the colour palette, or where forms briefly fall apart.

Even the skull, which appears in several works, does not seem to be a sombre symbol. It belongs to the same visual world as skin, milk and hair. Beauty and transience not only coexist, but are woven into a fascinating interplay in Maillard’s world.

The exhibition can be seen until 30 May at the Anna Helwing Gallery at Rotwandstrasse 39 in Zurich’s Kreis 4.

Dara Maillard’s (*2002, Sofia) artistic practice combines figurative painting with art-historical references from Eastern and Western European pictorial traditions, including Greco-Roman mythology, Orthodox iconography and depictions of female figures. Her work centres on questions of physicality, female identity and the representation of the body in the contemporary world. Through the reappropriation of archetypal female figures such as the muse, the goddess or the witch, she explores themes such as sensuality, pain, trauma and healing.

She received her Bachelor’s degree in 2023 and her Master’s degree in 2025 from the Zurich University of the Arts. In 2025, she received a scholarship from the American Foundation for Bulgaria in collaboration with the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts.