Zoa Monher (b. 1997, lives and works in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) is a Canary Islands–based visual artist whose painting practice explores the transformation of female identity and representations of feminine power within esotericism. At the beginning of her career, she worked under the name Zoso Monher, a pseudonym that allowed her to approach her personal experiences from a certain distance. Her decision to reclaim her own name, Zoa, marks a recognition of personal experience as a territory for artistic creation.
Her work takes motherhood as its starting point, understood as a physical and psychological initiation that transforms the body and alters one’s perception of the self. Monher asks what happens to a woman’s former identity when a mother is born, and why, throughout history, so many women have turned to similar symbols to represent their power. This recurrence raises a central question within her research: whether these symbols emerge from a shared cultural memory, from embodied experience, or from the need to give form to the invisible.
The artist works with digital museum archives. Through photography and collage, she inserts her own body into compositions drawn from classical painting, altering the positions, gestures, and power structures of the original images. She then translates these compositions onto paper or canvas using acrylic and oil pastel. Alchemy, Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological interpretations, and Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s studies of symbolism provide her with frameworks through which to approach identity as matter in a constant state of transformation.
Her research engages with the spiritual and chromatic universe of Hilma af Klint, the political and maternal dimension of Mónica Sjöö, and the transformative darkness of Adriana Ciudad. Visually, her painting brings together the chromatic freedom of Post-Impressionism and Fauvism with the visual synthesis of Japanese illustration. Her practice also finds affinities with Helen Frankenthaler, Tracey Emin, Yoshitomo Nara, Yayoi Kusama, and Studio Lenca, particularly in the relationship between materiality, autobiography, and identity.
A graduate in Fine Arts from the University of Salamanca, with a Master’s degree in Graphic Design from UDIT, Monher spent several years working in digital design before turning her focus fully to her artistic practice in 2025. Since then, she has developed a steadily growing career: she participated in Fermento at Espacio La Panera, Tenerife (2025), and in Hybrid Art Fair, Madrid (2026), where she was selected by the Asociación Islas Canarias de Artistas Visuales. The acquisition of several of her works by the Government of the Canary Islands Collection in 2026 reflects the growing institutional recognition of her practice and her increasing presence within the Canary Islands contemporary art scene.
Statement
“Motherhood appears in my practice as an alchemical force that transforms the way I create, care, and understand the body. I am interested in exploring the power of the female body in its animal, spiritual, and symbolic dimensions: a body capable of turning blood into milk, sustaining life, and undergoing a profound physical and personal transformation.
This experience opened up a different sensitivity within me and a new perception of the body as origin, memory, and transition. Symbols connected to the goddess, cycles, fertility, alchemy, and Kabbalah emerge throughout my work. I draw on them to revisit the myths and images that have historically defined femininity, shifting ideas of obedience, sacrifice, and monstrosity toward forms of autonomy, intuition, and transformation.
My work enters into dialogue with artists such as Hilma af Klint, Mónica Sjöö, and Adriana Ciudad, who have used the image as a space for revelation and thought. Visually, I construct symbolic atmospheres through colors associated with mysticism and feminine power, with a sensibility close to Impressionism and the compositional delicacy of Japanese illustration.
I seek to create open-ended images capable of awakening a memory, an intuition, or a different interpretation in each viewer.”
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