Paloma Navares’ recent exhibition, “Del jardin de la memoria” (Of the garden of memory), presented images of women taken from famous paintings of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, by artists including Cranach (both elder and younger), Botticelli, Titian, Dürer, Rubens, Goya, and Ingres. Inevitably, the sixty-eight female nudes Navares selected—many of them Venuses or Eves—reflected standards of “beauty” defined by the male artists who painted them.

The most arresting piece in the show was a video installation entitled Sombras del un sueño profundo (Shadows of deep sleep, 1984–85), in which