LUCUMA TEARS
Marianna Angel
23 May, 2025 – 30 June, 2025
Curated by Claire Breukel
NIA Gallery debuts the first European exhibition by Miami based artist Marianna Angel. Inspired by personal experiences, female personas, underground music and art scenes, fellow performance artists, and more, Angel’s wide-ranging approach to media is grounded by a strong conceptual voice. Writing, collage, drawing, video, and music form part of Angel’s repertoire, and become tools through which to address narratives of wellbeing, sexual life, and female empowerment.
Curated by Claire Breukel, Angel’s NIA Gallery debut exhibition is titled “Lucuma Tears”— Lucuma a healthy fruit that sustains the body, and tears being a double entendre of crying and of ripping or tearing, an action used in the artist’s work. For the exhibition, Angel has created a series of new collages that compile repurposed camera film, found objects and ephemera, into visual stories that express various states of being and suggest stories. This will be accompanied by an intimate text and video-based artworks.
Artist's Statement
My work deals with the idea of lost identity and how it changes as circumstances evolve around us. These circumstances have been intimate relationships, platonic and romantic. The work transforms from nostalgia to multiple intertwining timelines, and I intersect myself in many forms. I am gradually diving deeper into the vagueness of identity. Performance has in a sense allowed a passageway for ego death, creating a personal trance like state in which I separate from my ”flesh prison." But it is no longer about me and my history, instead an opening, a clear but ominous path about something that is hollow and yet to be inhabited. At its core, my practice explores the interconnectedness of the human experience.
About
Marianna Angel is a Miami-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans collage, photography, video, and performance. Rooted in personal experience, her work explores the complexities of contemporary womanhood—navigating themes of sexuality, intimacy, emotional labour, and the balance between dependence and autonomy.
With vulnerability as a core strategy, Angel transforms personal narratives into shared reflections. Her works often begins as written diary entries, evolving into visual compositions that incorporate images from her private life alongside found materials. The result is a body of work that reads like an open conversation—raw, intimate, and deeply self-aware.
Angel’s practice is driven by a desire for her power through expression. She confronts societal expectations of femininity by reclaiming her own experiences, using art as a means of validation and resistance. Her collages function as visual storytelling—layered, confessional, and emotionally charged—while her video work, such as Ashes, evokes the legacy of body-based performance art. In this piece, she uses ash as both material and metaphor, creating fluid, gestural marks with her body in a poetic act of presence and transformation.
Through her bold, introspective approach, Marianna Angel invites viewers into a world that is at once deeply personal and universally resonan
