Living Sculptures
Marie-Lou Desmeules creates Living Sculptures through a process she calls Painting Surgery. Working directly on human models, she constructs temporary sculptural figures using paint, hair, fabric, found objects, and improvised materials. Faces are reconstructed, proportions exaggerated, and familiar features distorted, producing figures that exist somewhere between portraiture, performance, and the grotesque. Beneath each elaborate construction, the human body remains visibly present.
Paint
Human body
Hair, fabric & found objects
Materials
Photography
Video
Performance
Forms
Formats
Frames
Digital
Lightboxes
ICONS
The Icons series draws on recognizable figures from art history, politics, film, music, and popular culture. Rather than attempting faithful imitation, Desmeules reconstructs these familiar faces through exaggerated anatomy, accumulated materials, and deliberate artificiality.
The resulting portraits move between caricature and sculpture, glamour and grotesque distortion. Their constructed surfaces remain conspicuous, allowing the absurdity, theatricality, and sometimes unsettling nature of these cultural icons to emerge in unexpected ways.
Related Works
