Marie-Pier Lopes’ artistic practice is rooted in an engaged inquiry into the representation of the female body, beauty standards, and the mechanisms of perception that shape them within contemporary society. Informed by her personal background in dance and fashion, her work adopts a critical stance toward the images that construct and condition our relationship to the body. She develops a hybrid visual language combining collage and painting, in which collage functions as both a conceptual and narrative starting point.
By appropriating and diverting images drawn from contemporary visual culture, she destabilizes their original meanings to generate new readings. These compositions are then enlarged and transposed onto large wooden panels, a material she alters, carves, and transforms using a range of tools, allowing chance and accident to play a central role in the process.
Her recent work expands this investigation toward more intimate and universal themes such as identity, the metaphor of the mask, individuation, and the emotional arc of grief. Her practice unfolds within a fragile balance between materiality and image, attraction and discomfort, where subtle formal shifts are capable of profoundly altering the interpretation of a scene.
“I often feel like a painter-surgeon, or even a dentist of colors, repairing invisible fractures. Sometimes, I truly feel like I’m practicing a vital profession—as if, through the medium, I could heal something or someone invisible… I deeply believe that art has this power.”
Among the artists who nourish her imagination and artistic reflection are Kiki Smith, Francis Bacon, Anne-Sophie Tschiegg, and Cecily Brown.