3D modelling and experimentation are at the heart of the aesthetics and artistic research of Linda Marwan (Leipzig, 1989). In 2025 Marwan, like a maenad, appeared in the gallery cradling an Orca Larva (the baby) against her chest, with a retractable mouth that was frankly terrifying. Modelled in negative, its shape fit the artist’s chest perfectly, like a rather original kind of dress-jewel. The grotesque and the hyperrealism of video games, in fact, shape the way the artist gives form, in images and sculptures, to presences that inhabit spaces and projects, at times ironic, at times frightening.
Exploring the field with full awareness of the new paths art can take, Linda Marwan builds works firmly anchored to the most rigid structures of the gallery, without giving up on imagining them in motion and active in the elsewhere of the metaverse. In this regard, her beloved Chimeras, Tatzelwurm and Annalise, are the protagonists of a stripped-back, slender structure, like the giants of construction that populate the ever-new areas of expanding cities. Embracing the aesthetics of a handcrafted, manual production, tied to the possibility of shaping metals and large sculptures, the artist hybridises the space of her research, which draws on many kinds of knowledge and layered materials.
If mythology and its great figures have never been foreign to the world of video games (which, in fact, very often have found their most memorable protagonists in myth), it is worth stressing how deeply felt the reference to the chimera is in Linda Marwan’s work and aesthetics. From the genealogy of the egg (Wiege, 2026) to installations such as Athene noctua (2025), her project never betrays its interest in a deep, open-ended inquiry into the many forms through which both society and the fantasy universe build extraordinary spaces and imaginaries.
If Athene noctua is also the scientific name of the little owl, which lives among the trees and at night, how could we not think of Athena, the great mythological figure of courage and intelligence?
Passionate about diverse fields of knowledge and attentive to an art open to both innovation and experience, Marwan brings her dreamlike, childlike universe into a body of research that investigates the monstrous in history and society, taking into account the developments and aesthetics that art history has offered over time. By widening boundaries and hybridising the forms of imagination, Linda Marwan thus places the body of art along the transformative drive that runs energetically through every choice and every gesture of the human symbolic world.
