The most Canadian of New Yorkers, Marianna Rothen is now represented by Polka Gallery !

For years, Marianna Rothen walked the catwalks of the greatest fashion designers - Marc Jacobs and Jil Sander - and collaborated with prestigious magazines. Before taking the plunge, on a one-way journey behind the lens...

"I started photography at a very early age, around fourteen," she recalls, sipping her Diet Coke in a Midtown hotel in New York. During the day, I posed for photographers, often men. And in the evening I would shoot my model friends. It was behind the lens that I finally found a way to express myself."

Loneliness, femininity, gender: the themes explored by the artist, who was born in Canada in 1982, grew up in Switzerland and now lives in the United States, take the form of quaint, engaging and intriguing visual narratives. Using subtle lighting effects and carefully constructed sets, she replaces her models, dressed in retro costumes and wigs, in the nostalgia of the 1950s and 1960s.

Marianna Rothen fashions a matriarchal society in which men no longer have a place. Absent from her first two series, Snow and Rose (2005-2012) and Shadows in Paradise (2015-2016), they appear as wax mannequins, like objects, in Mail Order (2017-2018) and Making it Real, produced during the confinement of 2020.