Harper’s is pleased to announce Reliquary of the Body: Returning to Eden, Spanish Norwegian painter Iréne Norén’s first exhibition with the gallery. Through a new body of paintings, Norén explores the female form as a site where perception is constructed, internalized, and ultimately undone through the appropriation of religious motifs. The exhibition opens Tuesday, May 12, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Working primarily in oil on canvas, Norén creates paintings centered on the female figure, often rendered nude and situated in symbolic environments that collapse interior and exterior space. Her work approaches the figure not as an object of observation, but as a psychological and emotional terrain shaped by the history of Catholic iconography. Drawing from the narrative structure of early Renaissance altarpieces, the exhibition unfolds as a multi-panel cycle in which each painting marks a stage in a larger spiritual journey. Norén reclaims this structure to trace an internal process of self-discovery in her protagonists. In these figurative works, the body itself becomes the reliquary: a sacred container through which experience is absorbed and transformed into higher states of awareness.
At the center of the exhibition is a cycle of mises-en-scène that follow a psychological pilgrimage, drawing on Catholic allegories of exposure, shame, judgment, and spiritual release. The first painting, The Performance, introduces the body as something constructed and rehearsed. Here, two women occupy an intimate interior where gesture and reflection convey how identity is learned and embodied. In The Exposure, the figure is fully visible at center stage, simultaneously confronting and being confronted by the gaze of an audience, as vulnerability becomes spectacle. The Solitude, by contrast, marks a turning inward. Removed from the presence of others, the nude subject is no longer directly observed, yet the experience of being seen persists. Shame lingers without definition, while awareness begins to take hold, preparing the ground for internalization.
In The Judgment, the gaze has been absorbed by the subject itself. Three surrounding figures evoke the internal voices that shape perception through their clenched eyelids and pensive postures; judgment is no longer external but embedded in the subject. Building on this recognition, The Ritual introduces the possibility of transformation. Set in an open landscape beneath a crucifix, the figures engage in a quiet act of release, where reflection begets forgiveness. The series concludes with the sixth painting, Returning to Eden. A solitary figure stands in a luminous landscape as a snake rises before her. Referencing the Genesis narrative while reshaping its meaning, the encounter proposes awareness rather than temptation as an outcome for the female protagonist.
Together, the six paintings in Reliquary of the Body: Returning to Eden form a narrative cycle in which the body emerges as both subject and instrument of metamorphosis. Moving from performance and exposure toward ritual and return, Norén repurposes the visual logic of Catholic devotion to trace how perception is first imposed, internalized, and ultimately reconstituted from within. Rather than depicting redemption as something granted externally, the work locates it in the body itself, where systems of judgment are absorbed and undone.
Iréne Norén (b. 1992, El Abir, Spain) is a current MFA candidate at New York Academy of Art, and participated in an artist residency at Michael Werner Gallery, New York, in 2022. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at Untitled Miami Beach, FL (2025); Claridge’s, London (2025); and Harper’s, East Hampton (2024). Her artistic practice has been featured in publications, including Emaho Magazine, Instyle, and Tory Daily. Noren lives and works in New York City.