La Maruja presents six vibrant, large-scale diasec photographs and a single-channel video in which artist PILAR MATA DUPONT interrogates the historical and cultural mythos of the feminine, both within her own ancestry and across disparate cultures. Within a distinguished global exhibition history, this exhibition marks Mata Dupont's second solo exhibition with MOORE CONTEMPORARY.

But who is La Maruja? Writes catalogue essayist Lauren Carroll Harris:
"According to the disparaging feminine noun in Spanish, she is a gossip, an obsessive consumer of telenovelas, a housewife whose life is defined by domesticity and pettiness, cooking and cleaning... She is Pilar's great-great-grandmother María Cristina... She is an archetype of mothers, of women, of the overlooked and reviled and mistrusted, the stifled and the choked. She is the illness suffered by María Cristina... She is a vessel for women's testimony, passed down and down, through stricken eras and troubled family trees. Beyond any individual, she stands as a compromised, mythic matriarch trapped in a personal history, a familial investigation and a saga of psychology and place."

La Maruja is presented at MOORE CONTEMPORARY overlapping with the premiere exhibition of Mata Dupont's film The Ague at the Samstag Museum of Art in South Australia from 22nd October to 3rd December 2021.