Wynnie Mynerva

Wynnie Mynerva was born in 1992 in Villa El Salvador, a district of Lima, Peru. They studied art history for three years at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and later earned a BA in Fine Arts in 2017 from the Escuela Nacional Superior Autonoma de Bellas Artes del Peru.

Mynerva's practice moves between painting, performance, video, and installation, and consistently returns to the body, gender, sexuality, and transformation as subject matter, sometimes literally altering their own body as part of the work. In 2023, "The Original Riot" at the New Museum in New York, their first solo museum exhibition in the United States, paired a monumental panoramic painting with a rib surgically removed from the artist's own body, presented as a sculptural object.

Early career recognition came largely through Peruvian institutions: finalist standing in the Banco Central de Reserva Painting Contest (2019 and 2020), the Contemporary Art Award (2019 and 2020), Pasaporte para un Artista (2020), and the National Visual Arts Meeting of Trujillo (2018), among others. International support followed through a residency at The Fountainhead in Miami (2019) and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where they were selected to participate beginning in 2024. As of mid-2026, gallery materials describe the artist as living and working between Berlin and Barcelona.

Coverage of Mynerva's work has clustered around their 2023 New Museum debut, with pieces in Artsy and Artnet News addressing the show. Critics and curators have tended to read the work through the body as a site of both violence and self-authorship: the surgically removed rib is treated less as a shock tactic than as a literal enactment of themes the paintings raise about gender, desire, and control. The recurring critical thread is the artist's willingness to make their own body, not just its image, part of the work.

Mynerva's auction history begins with a work titled "Bailo mi ritmo, pero no me detengo" (2022), which sold for GBP 139,700 against an estimate of GBP 8,000 to 12,000 at a Phillips London New Now sale on 6 December 2023, described by the house as the artist's auction debut result. Further confirmed results include "All My Tears," which sold for GBP 82,550 at Phillips London on 8 March 2024, and "Story of Revenge 2," which sold for USD 46,990 at Phillips New York on 15 May 2024, alongside smaller day-sale lots such as "El deseo amenaza." These point to a small but active secondary market built almost entirely around day-sale, single-artist lots rather than evening-sale prices. The market remains new and is driven primarily by the artist's primary-market galleries, LatchKey in New York, Societe in Berlin, Gathering in London, and Galeria Mayoral in Barcelona, rather than by a deep resale history.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Wynnie Mynerva, which is typical of an artist at this early career stage, and works are best verified through the representing galleries rather than any third-party authentication body. The auction record is limited to a small number of day-sale lots at Phillips in London and New York since the artist's 2022 to 2024 works began appearing at auction, so any single result should be read as one data point rather than as evidence of a stable trend. The stronger signal for collectors is the pace of institutional attention, museum solos and a major European residency, arriving well ahead of any secondary-market depth.