Maryline Lemaitre

  • My work develops in series, like chapters of a single story. Each series explore a particular atmosphere, a visual vocabulary that allows me to explore an idea further. Some series interact with memory and traces of the past, others with a more fragile present or visions of the future. Linked together, they compose a moving work where poetry, humor, and imagination intersect.

    The Cosmodames series:
    I've always been an inveterate dreamer, a willing inhabitant of my "little bubble": this intimate space where I can think, create, write, and breathe, far from the hustle and bustle of the world. This is where the Cosmodames were born: women in vintage dresses, wearing floral helmets. Not suits of armor, but bubbles of reverie, protective and light. With their heads in the stars but their feet firmly on the ground, they offer a coffee, a smile, a cake—an invitation to share this intimate and cosmic universe.

Maryline Lemaitre was born in France and lived in Asia for nine years before moving to Canada in 2001. She employs photography, collage, and superimpositions, as well as acrylics, oil pastels, graphite pencils, and spray paint.

It is an intuitive process inspired by a picture, a pattern or some words which could be the key to define a theme, and begin a series. Topics vary over time because they are inspired by her everyday life, by her memory, or are the expression of her unconscious. Her search for beauty links her artistic practice to moments of joy, everyday humour and poetry. While her themes vary according to her environment, Lemaitre's semi-abstract compositions often relate to nature, women, and childhood.

Maryline Lemaitre has participated in a lot of solo and group shows around the world. Her paintings are part of the Cirque du soleil collection and of many corporate and private collections in the US, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Singapour and Shanghai. Her works have also been used as cover illustrations for two books published in Canada.