Marcelle Hanselaar: Rebel Women

20 Mar-10 May 2026

A Cautionary Tale, 2024, Oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm

Overview

“Any woman worth her salt is a rebel.”
– Marcelle Hanselaar

In Rebel Women, Marcelle Hanselaar resurrects the heroines of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha — the women who seduced, outwitted and destroyed men on their own terms, despite existing in worlds built entirely to contain them.

Developed from her celebrated print series Rebel Women from the Apocrypha – now held in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – this body of paintings draws on stories from biblical and apocryphal texts whose protagonists have captivated and unsettled audiences for millennia. Lilith, Delilah, Salome; these are not pious women. They are manipulators, seductresses and tricksters who make fools of powerful men, topple armies, and dance with severed heads. And yet they were also celebrated, even by the male scribes who first recorded their deeds, because they acted with a force of will that the patriarchal order could condemn but never fully suppress.