Essay Marie Le Lievre. Art Collector. Alison Bartley 2018

2020

Marie Le Lievre's seductive paintings have been garnering a lot of attention of late, according to her Wellington gallerist Alison Bartley of Bartley + Company Art. After a successful presentation with Bartley at Sydney Contemporary last year, Le Lievre made it to the covers of Art News New Zealand and New Zealand's arts and literature mag Tahake, as well as being dubbed an artist to watch by Home NZ magazine.

Le Lievre's works flirt with chaos and containment within the picture plane, as boundaries are at once playfully pushed and pared back. "Under the sumptuous depths of her surfaces - the layers of oil paint slowly built up on top of each other - is an engagement with the history and politics of painting, and an interest in disrupting notions of purity," says Bartley. "It is sensuous and intellectual, inward- looking and out-reaching at the same time."

"Painting is a medium speaking to a language of feeling." says Le Lievre of her practice. "The paint itself operates metaphorically: revealing and concealing, layering and veiling, building depth over time. Painting's ability to operate at this level is what it's all about for me." Le Lievre is also represented by Jonathan Smart Gallery in Christchurch.

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