The Fremin Gallery curatorial efforts to showcase a diverse perspective of ~True Beauty~ in my opinion has yielded a few terrific selections. IN recent emails I have seen the topic of Beauty a couple of times. THis selection of artist are the most diverse artistically accomplished to date. Jamie Forbes, Publisher Fineartmagazineblog.blogspot.com, and Sunstormfineartmagazine.com
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Fremin Gallery is pleased to present True Beauty, a group exhibition exploring how beauty is perceived, experienced, and redefined through contemporary female perspectives. On view from June 4 through July 12, 2026, the exhibition brings together works by five contemporary artists: Lauren Camara, Mercedes Jelinek, Leila Massenet Varasteh, Reka Nyari and Daisy Seilern. We will be offering 20 signed posters from Lauren Camara to our first visitors this Thursday.
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| | Lauren Camara is a Bronx-based, self-taught artist and graphic designer who creates layered portraits made entirely from carefully cut paper. Her work grows out of everyday encounters and quiet, often overlooked moments, turning them into colorful visual stories that feel both personal and familiar. She is drawn to the small, meaningful details that shape people’s lives, and her portraits reflect the idea that even simple moments can hold deep emotion and significance. Camara works from photographs of her subjects, building each portrait from her large and ever-growing collection of papers. Color and material are at the heart of her process where every piece of paper is chosen to reflect the personality, energy, and story of the person she is depicting. She spends hours cutting, arranging, and layering, allowing the slow, hands-on process to guide the final image. During this time, she focuses closely on the individual, thinking about their presence and character, so that the finished portrait feels thoughtful and connected rather than just visual.
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Mercedes Jelinek (b. 1985) is an American artist and photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Specializing in black and white photography, she transforms her images through painting and collage, constructing visual narratives that explore the diversity of humanity and the intimate stories of her subjects. Her practice is deeply rooted in travel and cross-cultural engagement, often involving immersive experiences with people around the world—learning their values, traditions, and daily lives. A recurring element in her work is water—not only as a symbolic and physical motif but also as a space of transformation. When Jelinek enters the water, she sees it as an act of immersion into the culture surrounding her, a way to dissolve boundaries and connect more deeply with place and people.
Her ongoing series, De Translation, originated from her personal experience of acculturation in foreign environments. It captures the emotional arc of adapting to a new culture—from the disorientation and isolation of language barriers to the eventual serenity and belonging that emerge through time and connection. Each portrait in the series is composed of individual inkjet prints layered on recycled pages from Italian books and vintage music sheets—printed in either black and white or blue and white. These materials add layers of meaning, referencing both the cultural context of her subjects and the texture of her own journey through adaptation and understanding.
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Leila Massenet Varasteth is a French-born, New York–based artist whose work is driven by emotion, intuition, and lived experience. Entirely self-taught, she has been painting since childhood, shaped by a deeply creative upbringing within a family of artists. Her practice is rooted in a profound sensitivity to life—drawing inspiration from personal experience, beauty, and the energy of the world around her. For Leila, painting is an essential and therapeutic act. Her work serves as a conduit through which she processes and releases deeply felt emotions, translating intensity into a raw yet controlled visual language. Each canvas becomes a space where vulnerability and strength coexist, reflecting both the weight and vitality of her inner world.
In her recent "The Night series", Massenet Varasteth works in oil on canvas, building compositions through layered, crisscrossing brushstrokes that create a palpable sense of movement and tension. The works are defined by a restrained, often monochromatic palette, where light emerges from darkness in rhythmic, almost sculptural forms. The present work exemplifies this approach: a fragmented, almost dissolving figure emerges from a dense black ground, its form constructed through expressive, intersecting strokes. The surface is alive with energy—each mark both deliberate and instinctive—creating a sense of vibration across the canvas. The figure feels at once present and elusive, as if caught between appearance and disappearance. This interplay of light and shadow, solidity and fragmentation, reflects the emotional undercurrent of the work—an exploration of inner states that are powerful, complex, and constantly in motion.
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Born in 1979 in Helsinki and raised in Finland, Nyari came to New York City at the age of seventeen. While there, she studied at the School of Visual Arts, where she not only began to model but found her passion for photography. Using inspiration from masters such as Helmut Newton and Cindy Sherman, Nyari’s work employs and explores the traditional ideal of beauty and gender to portray sexuality from a predominately female perspective. She utilizes technical elements such as gestures, nudity, the subject’s gaze, objects, and more to link this connection of the empowered feminine identity. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Through such exposure, she has received multiple prestigious awards, including the first-place winner of the International Photography Awards in 2010, Beauty Pro Category. Her 225-page Monograph titled “Femme Fatale: Female Erotic Photography” is published in 6 languages and sold worldwide.
Nyari’s choice to puncture nature-based patterns into each portrait also has its own significance. She stated that when “talking about scarification and getting over trauma, to me, nature is one of the most healing and beautiful elements.”As Nyari emphasizes through her photographs, when you add a personal story onto the skin, it is a whole new layer that often becomes biographical. It translates a story to the audience of one’s past, future, and wishes. While this concept existed in her previous photographic series, now, through puncturing the surface of each, Nyari is adding another layer of permanence to her works’ meaning, therefore becoming, as she calls it, “ink cubed”.
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Daisy Seilern is an award-winning Austrian artist whose practice spans fine art photography, sculpture, and contemporary mixed media. Known for her emotionally resonant visual language and deep commitment to material experimentation, Seilern’s work interrogates the boundaries between traditional beauty and the raw, often overlooked elements of the everyday. With a foundation in classical portraiture and formal training in fine art, she has developed a distinct aesthetic that merges precision with spontaneity — allowing movement, texture, and imperfection to become central to her visual storytelling.
Her latest body of work, Discarded Queen, represents a pivotal moment in her career — a bold thematic and material shift that reflects her growing interest in sustainability, circularity, and the politics of consumption. In this mixed-media series, Seilern combines photography with salvaged materials such as plastics, newspapers, textiles, and industrial remnants, which she meticulously reconfigures into sculptural garments. These wearable assemblages, created entirely from what society casts aside, are then worn by her models and photographed in stylized, regal poses. The final resulting images — printed on Alu-Dibond and encased in deep plexiglass box frames — possess a striking three-dimensionality, blurring the line between image and object, surface and sculpture. Each figure in the series emerges from a carefully constructed environment of cast-off materials, standing proud and poised amid mounds of human excess. In transforming the remnants of overconsumption into symbols of strength, dignity, and grace, Seilern questions the hierarchies of value and beauty that dominate contemporary culture.
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