Where the body becomes image, and the image becomes belief.

Marie-Lou Desmeules, also known as Lourie, is a Québec-born, Berlin-shaped, Spain-based multidisciplinary artist working across living sculpture, photography, painting, film, installation, image-making, and sound.

Her practice examines transformation, illusion, devotion, and the unstable authority of the image. Known for her living sculptures and retro-illuminated Light Portraits, Desmeules uses the body as a site of construction: painted, staged, disguised, overexposed, and turned into a surface where identity becomes both visible and uncertain.

What began as ephemeral transformations of flesh has expanded into a broader visual and narrative world. Her recent work moves between performance, cinematic fiction, music, and ritualized pop imagery, including Clara Nocturne, a transmedia project where belief, melodrama, and spectacle are treated as artistic materials.

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Selected Biography

Desmeules’ work has been presented internationally, including at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Rivalry Projects in New York, and Interfilm Festival in Berlin. She was also commissioned for the HBO Max series Queer You Are in Barcelona, and created Façade, an interactive urban video installation commissioned by the City of Montréal and the Government of Québec.

She is the co-founder and art director of HARI Editions.

Across her work, Marie-Lou Desmeules continues to explore how images seduce, deceive, console, and transform us — and how, sometimes, what is constructed becomes what we believe.

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