Mary Clerté

A French multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and artistic director based in Paris, Mary Clerté builds an immediately recognisable universe, colourful, luminous, sensual and pop, yet she continually shifts style, moving like a chameleon between film, drawing and painting. Hollywood imagery and stereotypes of femininity become material for worlds that are sometimes strange, often comic and always visually precise. Clerté thinks simultaneously in overall narratives and frozen details. Working from film stills before moving through drawing to canvas, she transforms familiar images into fragments of a more personal reality. Beauty is often accompanied by unease; autobiography slips into fiction, and a certain blur keeps the scene open. Poetic, sensitive and intriguing, her works allow viewers to project their own stories into what remains deliberately unresolved.