Mariane Ibrahim

About the Gallery
Seven years after launching her namesake gallery in Seattle, Mariane Ibrahim moved the space to Chicago in 2019. In September 2021, the gallery opened its inaugural European space in Paris and in 2023 it opened a third space in Mexico City.

The gallery has hosted acclaimed exhibitions, with a founding focus on the African diaspora, from leading and emerging artists including Amoako Boafo, Yukimasa Ida, Peter Uka and Zohra Opoku. The gallery has worked with global renowned institutions and have had an international presence at art fairs with acclaimed and prize-winning presentations.

In 2021 Ibrahim was awarded The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of the Arts and the Letters) on behalf of the Ministry of culture in France. Notable prizes and appointments include the Prize Winner from Presents Section, The Armory Show 2017, current Selection Committee, The Armory Show, current Visionaries Committee, Performa Arts and member of the Art Dealers Association of America.

About the Presentation
Mariane Ibrahim will present work by Lorraine O'Grady and José Gamarra in a duo presentation at Independent 20th Century. Lorraine O’Grady (1934 - 2024) and José Gamarra (b. 1934) practices interrogate the construction of history. Their artworks address the violence and seduction embedded in the formation of the Americas, offering critical reflections on power, representation, and subjectivity. In artworks like The Clearing, O’Grady stages both ecstasy and exploitation through entwined interracial couples and emblems of conquest, exposing the foundational duplicities of the Western Hemisphere. With similar dialogue Uruguayan artist José Gamarra’s allegorical scenes where Indigenous figures, conquistadors, and even pop-cultural iconography coexist, transform conquest into an eternal, cyclical drama.

In a moment marked by overlapping global crises, the practices of Lorraine O’Grady and José Gamarra (both born in 1934) resonate with a striking urgency and contemporaneity. Across distinct trajectories, their works confront the entanglements of imperialism, ecological devastation, and the erasure of original cultures. They foreground, with clarity and persistence, questions of feminist agency, historical accountability, and our relationship to the natural world.