Marie Le Lievre

Underlying the sumptuous depths of Le Lievre’s surfaces and the pools of oil paint slowly built up on top of each other is an interest in disrupting notions of purity and teasing or corrupting the boundary between abstraction and figuration, painting and drawing. Also at play is a dance between chaos and containment with paint itself allowed a performative role within parameters defined by the artist. Revealing and concealing, layering and veiling, Le Lievre plays with existential themes of chaos and order, which have long underpinned her work.

Le Lievre has attracted significant attention in recent year. In the summer of 2017-18, she made it onto the covers of Art News New Zealand and New Zealand's arts and literature magazine Takahe, where Dr Maria Walls used statements from Canadian/US artist Agnes Martin as a rhetorical device to explicate the ambit of Le Lievre’s practice and to position her in relation to a historical trajectory of female sensibility in abstraction that is foremost about feeling

Le Lievre completed a Master of Fine Arts with distinction at the University of Canterbury in 2008. She has exhibited throughout New Zealand and in Australia, France and Japan. Her work is in private and public collections including the University of Canterbury, Christchurch Art Gallery and Fletcher Challenge Corporation. She has been a finalist in many art awards.