“Marla” (2021) by Niu Lemalu

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Marla (2021) is a painted study of the character Marla Singer played by Helena Bonham Carter in the 1999 film, Fight Club, directed by David Fincher and based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. This small-scale study reflects artist Niu Lemalu’s wider curiosity in popular culture and virality, and the character of Marla as the complex amalgamation of attraction and repulsion, daintiness and dirtiness (Source: At the Root of It: Marla Singer and the Preservation of Humanity), bravado and vulnerability.

Marla was one of two works Lemalu produced for the exhibition, Picture Me Rollin’ – Portraiture in the Southside curated by Ema Tavola for Vunilagi Vou in August 2021. The other portrait depicted another iconic character of American cinema: John Wick, played by Keanu Reeves in the first of the John Wick films released in 2014. Painted in the midst of the Covid-19 global pandemic, these filmic portraits pe...