images

profile

Michelle Marchesseault (b. 1974 Indianapolis, Indiana) splits time between Austin, Texas, where she paints, and New York City where she designs art for interiors, television, movies, and the stage. She designed the Long Island City restaurant M. Wells  and created the scenic work on the cult television show The Heart, She Holler. She attended the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. Her painting practice is marked by a stunning range and a material bravado. The works convey a passionate engagement with life, history, and memory.

In her eponymous solo show at Northern-Southern in 2018, Marchesseault first showed her softly constructivist “twist” paintings. Each twist is about three inches tall. They interlock, clasping each other in something like a weave. The large paintings have more twists. The smaller paintings have fewer. Marchesseault says the twist is a breath, painted in the duration of her exhale. Painting the twists is a calming routine. Peace hums from the organic geometries of the paintings.

Marchesseault’s second solo show with the gallery, Green Eyes signaled a period of transformation and discovery in her work. Fluorescent vinyl painting on linen are memories become vibrant haze—details half forgotten and filled in with magic.

“Inheritance”, from Green Eyes, is a composition of meals, painted from recollection upon a meditative table cloth/wallpaper of twists bending the pictorial space. In the upper left is an apple doll pierced with an arrow, St. Sebastian by way of William Tell. This, she says, is a self-portrait, perched cheerfully on top of the ruminative picnic. “Nurse’s Song”, first shown at NADA New York 2023, is in the same vein, memorializes a friend by remembering a shared meal. The words of a poem are gently embedded in lace-like flowers.

For a solo booth at NADA Miami 2023, Marchesseault painted an explication on apocalypse and its souvenirs. A pleasure city topples at the edge of a deluge. An exalted aura is crowned in laurels of pasta. A shelf of novelties swelters under pendulous sacks of full oranges. Visions of release summon themselves, warm and shimmering.

Marchesseault will next appear at the gallery in the group show interdependence, May–June 2024.

Email to request more information and a pdf of available works. To keep up with Marchesseault follow her on instagram.