Beauty is the Best Defense

“Beauty is the Best Defense,” a group exhibition that reframes decorative excess as a form of wit, resistance, and genderful expression. The exhibition runs from March 5–April 18, 2026. Spanning generations and geographies, the eight artists in this show explore ornament as armor and beauty as a survival tactic, mounting a spirited challenge to the long-held assumption that Minimalism represents the epitome of tasteful restraint and aesthetic discipline. That assumption, the exhibition suggests, has always conformed to an Anglo-Saxon, masculine norm—one that these artists collectively unsettle, complicate, and transcend.

A new body of glazed earthenware vessels and figures that turn ornament inward. Each vase is at once container and body - surfaces inscribed with figures, animals, and abstracted scenery that fold around the form. The title proposes ornament not as decoration but as armour: a way of staking a claim to a body that refuses fixed categories.

In Peroxide Bird (2026), a plumed blue bird snares a snake in its talons and captures a flying—or flailing—buxom figure within its train of peacock feathers. Mythological chaos reigns in What the River Leaves Behind (2025), which draws inspiration from Cleopatra and Homer’s sirens. Dissolving the boundaries between the feminine and masculine, and between the human and the animal, Boumjimar cross-pollinates desire and the grotesque.

Press: Meer, Contemporary Art Library, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Art Bae, In The Intersect