Lyse Lemieux at Wil Aballe, Vancouver

Lyse Lemieux’s practice is rooted in drawing, sculpture, painting, and installation. Her most recent exhibition presented at Wil Aballe, Habiller une fugue / Dressing a fugue, brings together recent and earlier works, creating a dialogue between different periods of her practice.

In painting, sculpture, and installation, drawing remains a generative force, with line moving fluidly between surface and space. At times describing, constructing, or disrupting the figure, her gestures unsettle distinctions between abstraction and representation, allowing images and materials to remain open, provisional, and in flux.

In her most recent series of semi-figurative and abstract pencil crayon drawings, Lemieux further extends this exploration. Built through dense accumulations of colour, layered marks, and textured surfaces, these works foreground drawing as both an image-making process and a physical encounter with material.

The exhibition also includes works dating back to 2014. The ongoing Odradek series offers a hybrid and enigmatic exploration of line and materiality in three dimensions. Evocative of garments, skins, and provisional architectures, their material construction resists any fixed or singular identity.

Recent paintings and drawings extend Lemieux’s signature bold black gestures through finely translucent layers and subtle fields of colour. Through the interplay of gesture, collage, and accumulated marks, the works evoke shifting references to bodies, garments, and interior spaces.

Invoking the multiple meanings of fugue—an escape or flight, but also a musical form structured through repetition, variation, and the reappearance of motifs—the title Habiller une fugue / Dressing a fugue becomes both a material act and a compositional strategy: a way of covering and constructing, while also concealing and reimagining the figure.

Habiller une fugue / Dressing a fugue brings different moments of Lemieux’s practice into relation, revealing how her gestures, materials, and figures continually transform while retaining traces of what came before.

Lyse Lemieux’s interdisciplinary practice is rooted in drawing and encompasses painting, sculpture, and installation. Her work explores the boundaries between abstraction and representation, evoking the human figure through simplified and fragmented forms. Examining relationships between body and garment, surface and structure, intimacy and public display, Lemieux combines formal precision with the tactile qualities of fabric and hand-made marks. Her work considers how identity, presence, and gesture are conveyed through material, form, and process. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include large-scale indoor and outdoor public artworks, creating connections between the gallery, museum, and public realm.

Originally from Ottawa, Lemieux studied at the University of Ottawa before earning a BFA from the University of British Columbia. She has exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally, including at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Rome; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Oakville Galleries; the Richmond Art Gallery; the Charles H. Scott Gallery (now the Libby Leshgold Gallery) in Vancouver; TrépanierBaer Gallery in Calgary; Katzman Art Projects in Halifax; Wil Aballe in Vancouver; Simon Fraser University Gallery (now the Gibson Art Museum) in Burnaby; and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. Lemieux has received grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2017, she received the VIVA Award from the Doris and Jack Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, recognizing her outstanding achievement and sustained commitment to the visual arts.

Recent projects include solo exhibitions at the Burnaby Art Gallery and the Art Gallery at Evergreen in Coquitlam, British Columbia, as well as an exhibition of new paintings at Loftyart Gallery in Taipei. She completed two large-scale public artworks in Vancouver in 2020 and 2021 and is currently developing a new public art commission in Burnaby, scheduled for installation in 2027.