Trish Clark Gallery is delighted to present flipping out, Marie Le Lievre’s first solo show at the gallery. Graduating with an MFA with Distinction from the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts in 2008, Le Lievre’s work has been exhibited in France, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In 2011 she was a selected finalist of the Wallace Award as well as being awarded the Canterbury Arts and Heritage Trust Award.
Drawing out tensions between chaos and order, Le Lievre constructs her paintings with layers of sometimes opaque, sometimes thinly dispersed, pigments – allowing the medium to take unpredictable figurations as it pours and slides across the canvas. Building complex arrangements of colour fields that stack and grate, while simultaneously slipping and bleeding into one another and across grainy drawn gestures, her works refuse to sit quietly upon the wall.
Departing almost entirely from representation in her new body of work, Le Lievre’s organic forms linger at the edge of consciousness and recognition in a heady dream-state. Playing with the relations between colour and music, the individual paintings in flipping out together form an immersive composition that flits around the viewer in swelling harmony and discord. Solid black forms create a percussive grounding, while flares of magenta and cerulean provide swelling melodies.
Figurative forms make a suggestion of an appearance however, in her continuing Paraphernalia series, which examines the significance of objects in expressing human spirituality and sentiment. Looking back to civilization’s early manifestations of material culture, Le Lievre’s Paraphernalia works suggest assemblages of objects of indistinct formation, rendering them part of a generalised impulse towards collecting and creating, rather than as distinct or identifiable entities.
Throughout, Le Lievre’s paintings remain in a space of indeterminacy, where the boundaries between objects and forms erode and create depth in their layering and instability.
