Luanne Martineau

Working within the sphere of figurative representation, Legs comes from a drawing series by Martineau where the body is depicted as an external and alienated garment. The meat of bodily flesh within Legs is a pointedly art historical site, drawing from the socio-aesthetic ambiguity of Guston¹s Ku Klux Klan hoods and De Kooning¹s misogynistic “ground zero” Woman paintings.

Luanne Martineau lives and works in Victoria, British Columbia, where she is a Professor of Drawing and Theory at the University of Victoria. Born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1970, Martineau studied art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Alberta College of Art & Design, completing her MFA at the University of British Columbia in 1995.

Martineau’s wool sculptures and drawings explore the places in between art genres, engaging a long tradition of social satire within contemporary art. Combining various methods of craft and the legacies of 1960s fine art, Martineau blurs the boundaries between style and ideology as well as high modernist art and the baseness of the body. Major works by Martineau have are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain, where her work will be featured in solo exhibition in February 2010. Currently, a new wool sculpture she completed is on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery as part of the exhibition How Soon Is Now.

In 2007, Martineau was the recipient of the Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award for the Visual Arts, has exhibited work at the Biennale de Montréal and was a guest lecturer at the Tate Modern for the Banff Centre for the Arts and Middlesex University symposium Informal Architecture.
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