In Mina Mond’s “medicine art” – under the layers of mysticism and religion, woman and reality, trauma and mortality – beats her own troubled heart
Some painters draw on myth. Mina Mond seems to work from within it. Her pictures do not quote folklore, religion, esotericism or history from a safe distance; they proceed as though these worlds are still contiguous with our own, still capable of breaking through the surface of ordinary life.
Mina Mond in 2026; photo: Fred Hurst
Saints, beasts, women, flames, forests, wounds, omens, rebels and spirits all inhabit the same charged space. In Mond’s work, ornament is never innocent. Symbol appears to carry a task: to ward off, to remember, to warn, to heal.
The Jungle, 2018, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, 71 x 31.5 in. / 180 x 80 cm
Mond was born in 1974, in Saverne, in Alsace, with several heart malformations, one of which was extremely rare. She underwent major pioneering surgery at nine months old and later developed severe arrhythmia of which she says: “It is as if you had a leaking tap inside your body driving you mad.” Such strikingly concrete imagery is characteristic. Even before painting intervenes, there is already, in Mond’s way of speaking, a passage from bodily ordeal to inner vision.
Nyx, 2026, egg tempera and gold leaf on canvas, 39.5 x 47 in. / 100 x 120 cm
Although her health issues continued into adulthood, she went to university where she studied visual arts. Here, the contemporary work she was asked to create made her uncomfortable: “It was not me. I had to pretend.“ After that, she stopped painting for 20 years, instead imagining becoming a pastor. But this, she says, was “hardly compatible with my shyness and finally incompatible with the way I was going to evolve spiritually.“
By PALOMA HERMINA HIDALGO
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #128.
