_Bio Following a year of studies at the Florence Classical Arts Academy in Italy, where she developed a specialised expertise in drawing and painting, Rosalie Gamache obtained a bachelor’s degree in visual and media art at Université Laval in 2018. She is the recipient of several grants, and her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada and in Europe, including at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Frauenmuseum in Bonn and at the Florence Biennale.
_Approach In her painting, Rosalie Gamache revisits the historic codes of the portrait and the still life from a contemporary perspective. Using the same technique as several classical painters, she places their skills in representation and illusion in the service of a feminist and queer posture, with a sacrilegious desire to overturn values and subjects. Gamache illustrates a great variety of bodies deformed by a material evocative of paint, giving them an androgynous and intersexual quality. In contrast with the traditional nude in painting, in which the female body is passive and given up to the male gaze, her work seeks to create a new feminist imagery for queer identities.
_Project At the symposium, Rosalie Gamache will continue her pictorial investigation into the nude and the misshapen, composing two new oil paintings depicting bodies covered with a white or coloured material evocative of paint itself. Frozen in strange poses and shown in tight framing, these painted, joined and deformed bodies will lean to abstraction. Gamache will give her models a degree of androgyny by concealing or adding to their attributes. For her part, the liquid material covering her subjects, suggesting the ability to be transformed, will symbolise the fluidity of bodies and of gender identities in transition. Devoid of aesthetization, the bodies she paints will form part of a new approach, outside hetero-normative imagery.
Photo credit : John Martinez
