Marie Le Lievre, Stacked (Lettings) (detail), 2024, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Two Rooms, Auckland.
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Marie Le Lievre, SUM, 2025, still from moving image work in collaboration with Emma Wallbanks. Courtesy of the artist.
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Relinquishing of complete control is the wellspring of discovery for Marie Le Lievre. Her singular paintings require the ground as a starting point – paint is poured onto the canvas and manipulated by hand in an intuitive process that allows the medium to take its own course.
With a background in psychology, these works – painting, drawing, photography and collaborative film – become an explorative self-portrait of the artist.
The central floor work, Inventory, repurposes past painting by combining canvases. Unstretched and laid out, they return to the condition from which they were first created. The central chromatic strip running down the centre of the work could be read as a core sample, a cross section of the multiple layers that constitute her paintings. For Le Lievre the work functions as a recalibration, clearing the slate, and set of choices that contend with letting go, moving on, and the opportunities for renewal it provides.
Relinquishing of complete control is the wellspring of discovery for Marie Le Lievre. Her singular paintings require the ground as a starting point – paint is poured onto the canvas and manipulated by hand in an intuitive process that allows the medium to take its own course.
With a background in psychology, these works – painting, drawing, photography and collaborative film – become an explorative self-portrait of the artist.
The central floor work, Inventory, repurposes past painting by combining canvases. Unstretched and laid out, they return to the condition from which they were first created. The central chromatic strip running down the centre of the work could be read as a core sample, a cross section of the multiple layers that constitute her paintings. For Le Lievre the work functions as a recalibration, clearing the slate, and set of choices that contend with letting go, moving on, and the opportunities for renewal it provides.
