HABILLER UNE FUGUE / DRESSING A FUGUE
SOLO EXHIBITION
WIL ABALLE GALLERY
September 9 to October 17, 2026 , Vancouver, CA
Exhibition statement
Lyse Lemieux’s practice encompasses drawing, sculpture, painting, and installation. Her most recent exhibition, Habiller une fugue / Dressing a Fugue —presented at Wil Aballe—brings together both recent and earlier works, establishing a dialogue between different periods of her practice.
Across her paintings, sculptures, and installations, drawing remains a generative force, with lines circulating freely between surface and space. Whether descriptive, constructive, or disruptive of the figure, her gestural approach blurs the distinctions between abstraction and representation, leaving images and materials open, provisional, and in a state of constant transformation.
In her latest series of semi-figurative and abstract coloured-pencil drawings, Lemieux continues this exploration. Built through dense accumulations of color, layered marks, and textured surfaces, these works highlight drawing both as a process of image-making and as a physical encounter with material.
The exhibition also includes works dating back to 2014. The Odradek series—an ongoing project—offers a hybrid, enigmatic exploration of line and materiality within three-dimensional space. Evoking garments, skins, and temporary architectures, these material constructions resist any fixed or singular identity.
Her recent paintings and drawings build upon Lemieux’s signature bold, black gestures by incorporating thin, translucent layers and subtle fields of color. Through the interplay of gesture, collage, and the accumulation of marks, the works give rise to shifting references to bodies, clothing, and interior spaces. Evoking the multiple meanings of the word "fugue"—an escape or a flight, but also a musical form structured by the repetition, variation, and reappearance of motifs—the title Habiller une fugue / Dressing a Fugue becomes both a material gesture and a compositional strategy: a way of covering and constructing, while simultaneously concealing and reinventing the figure.
Photo credit : Mike Love photography
