Maria Clara

Aann Reynales

Oil on Canvas

24 x 24 inches

2026

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Maria Clara has long been imagined as the ideal Filipina—modest, obedient, and pure. This work reimagines her with a cigarette, not to celebrate vice, but to challenge the expectations placed upon women. It asks who defines femininity, virtue, and respectability, and what happens when women refuse to fit the roles history has written for them.