Our friends at Dangerous Minds turned us on to the incredible living sculptures of Valencia, Spain-based visual and performing artist Marie-Lou Desmeules today. Desmeules creates sculptures using people’s bodies as her base, covering her models under acrylic paint & recycled materials in order to transform them into the image of someone else, including some of Night Flight’s faves like John Waters, Divine, Andy Warhol and others.
“French-Canadian artist Marie-Lou Desmeules moved to Berlin at the age of 21 to start her career as a painter. She promptly felt restrained by that sole medium & began experimenting different techniques and mediums until she found her Painting Surgeries: a mix of performance, painting, sculpture and photography.
Most of all, Marie-Lou works directly on her models. She covers them under recycled material such as cothes, plastic, hair, paper & acrylic paint in order to create sculptures out of them. The final artworks are photographs of the living sculptures.
In her series “Celebrities”, Desmeules (re)creates pop culture icons and famous personnalities. Her work questions the notion of beauty, the growing cosmetic industry, genders and identity. Most of all, Marie-Lou invites the viewers to rethink the role of visuality in today’s image obsessed society.
Marie-Lou Desmeules is currently based in Valencia, Spain.