Dorothy Circus Gallery is honored to present She-dragons: The Untold Stories, a powerful solo exhibition by Olga Esther that confronts the narratives we inherit and dares to reimagine them. Esther reclaims the forgotten voices of fairy tales, the she-dragons who were never allowed to tell their own stories, the princesses who were confined to towers of silence.
"When I was a child, the stories taught me that dragons were always fierce and princes were always brave," the artist reflects. "Princesses, on the other hand, waited silently to be rescued, trapped in towers they never chose." But within these narratives, Esther recognized a deliberate erasure of the she-dragons and the rigid gender roles imposed upon us all. With this exhibition, she gives back the voice and the power that was always denied to them.
Esther's princesses no longer wait; they accompany, protect and are protected. Her she-dragons do not destroy castles, they weave bonds of care, tenderness and complicity, replacing violence with relationships of solidarity and affection. What emerges is a profound meditation on courage as the radical act of care.
The exhibition carries particular poignancy through its exploration of perception. Many of Esther's characters appear with bandages obscuring their eyes: a visual metaphor for our age's overexposure to images, which has taught us to rely on what we see rather than what we feel. This theme resonates through centuries of feminine experience: from the heightened sensorial abilities of women to the persecution of witches whose hypersensitivity was deemed threatening. Esther reclaims the power of feeling over seeing, of intuition over spectacle.
The artist's palette speaks its own language. The deliberate oscillation between pink and red invites us to look beyond superficial associations with childhood, these are shades of passion, of blood, of life itself. What appears fairytale-like reveals urgent social commentary, as all meaningful art must.
Devastated by recent events and ongoing war, Esther deliberately represents children as embodiments of the future, symbols of what we must protect above all else. "I invite you to imagine worlds where the extraordinary is not a threat but a mirror and an ally," she declares, "worlds where feared creatures can also be tender, and where bravery is measured in care, not destructive force."
In each work beats her conviction that stories can change and when they do, they change the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves. Because every princess carries a she-dragon within her, and every she-dragon carries a story that deserves to be told.
