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A painting with abstract pink, green, and yellow shapes in the background, featuring a sleeping person with black hair and a white shirt in the bottom right hand corner

Samuelle Grande: Out of the blue

Curated by

Sally Frater

The work of Montreal-born artist Samuelle Grande weaves experiences and observations drawn from her daily life with images sourced from anonymous scrapbooks, cinema and Western art history, creating free-wheeling, rhizomatic visual compositions. Her exhibition Out of the blue features paintings that hybridize these references, producing Grande’s personal visual lexicon. Each piece emerges through a visceral process of addition and erasure, evoking dream sequences and memories that overlap in surreal, painterly scenarios. What we do not see, in the everyday, informs her inclusive way of capturing memory, experience, and daily interactions. Born of Grande’s fascination with human relationships and the ways in which they empower us, the artist asserts that painting and drawing can be vehicles to reclaim the agency of our bodies.

Image credit: Samuelle Grande, Shelter (detail), 2023, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Partners
University of Guelph School of Fine Art and Music logo

This exhibition represents the culmination of two years of focused work in the University of Guelph’s Master of Fine Arts program. The Art Gallery of Guelph’s annual exhibitions of graduating MFA students is presented in conjunction with the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph.


Gallery

a painting depicting two feet at the edge of a pool with a woman swimming in it and a figure looking at the scene through a window in the background
Samuelle Grande
Out of the blue
five small paintings installed in a horizontal row on a gallery wall
Installation view
a painting of abstract shapes of blue, green, orange, white, and pink, blurred at the edges. A figure with dark hair lies on their side with their eyes closed in the bottom right corner
Samuelle Grande
Shelter
four large brightly coloured paintings installed on two conjoining walls in a gallery
Installation view
a painting of a woman wearing sunglasses and holding a purse with abstract shapes and lines in colours of green, brown, white, and orange behind her
Samuelle Grande
Secret Garden
a wall in an art gallery with text on the left side and a large blue and red painting of a hand holding a cup on the right side
Installation view
a row of paintings installed on two conjoining gallery walls, with two large paintings on either end and several small paintings between them
Installation view
a painting showing someone holding a green pea on a fork with a person eating and two chefs in the background
Samuelle Grande
Hall
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About the artist

Samuelle Grande

Samuelle Grande’s candid approach to colour, texture, and design explores personal and collective histories in forms that span installation, drawing and painting. She holds a DEC in Cinema and Communications from Cégep de Saint-Laurent in Montreal, a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) with a specialization in Studio Arts from Concordia University, and is completing a Masters of Fine Arts degree at the University of Guelph. She has exhibited her work in group and solo exhibitions at Parc Jarry in Montreal; Blackbird Studios, Montreal; and Boarding House Gallery in Guelph. In the summer of 2023 she will participate in a group exhibition at Galerie Nicolas Robert in Toronto.


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