DURAN CONTEMPORAIN presents
Inés Fernández-Shaw
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
September 10 to October 3, 2026
Opening reception: Thursday, September 10, 5-8 PM
The artist will be present
In collaboration with the Embassy of Spain in Ottawa
Duran Contemporain is pleased to present Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, a solo exhibition by Inés Fernández-Shaw, on view from September 10 to October 3, 2026. The exhibition marks an important presentation of the artist's work in Montreal and a significant introduction of her practice to North American audiences.
Presenting Fernández-Shaw's work comes from a precise conviction: her paintings arrive at a moment when questions of the gaze, self-image, and the representation of the female body occupy a central place in contemporary culture. In the age of the selfie, constant visibility, and accelerated image consumption, Fernández-Shaw translates these concerns into a form of painting that is slow, constructed, and deeply aware of its own history.
The discovery of her work happened, almost ironically, through one of the very spaces her practice interrogates: social media. In the continuous flow of images, where so much appears and disappears within seconds, her paintings immediately held the gaze. There was an evident pictorial command, but also a rare sense of strangeness: bodies placed on a stage, as figures both offered to view and withdrawn into their own mystery. The impact was immediate, evoking something of Francis Bacon's power of distortion, but with a more realistic precision, and something of Picasso's monumental tension, particularly in Guernica, not in subject, message, or scale, but in the ability to organize bodies, forms, and psychological intensity into an image that remains in the mind.
In Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, the artist explores the tension between observing and being observed. The bodies that inhabit her paintings are at once sensual, strange, and deliberately displaced. They bend, stretch, and adapt to the scene, as though identity itself had to take shape under observation, both her own and that of others. References to Spanish painting and the Flemish masters merge with a contemporary sensibility in which the female body is no longer simply represented, but reappropriated.
Recurring elements run throughout the exhibition: arches and frames, which evoke both window and stage; the moon, which bears the artist's face and becomes a figure of observation; and the blackbird, a symbol of the consciousness to which we have no access. These motifs create a world in which reality appears slightly distorted, as if in a mirror. Objects, bodies, and gazes seem distant, but they are closer than they appear.
The opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 10, from 5 to 8 PM, in the presence of the artist. The event is presented with the gracious participation of the Embassy of Spain in Ottawa.
