Pauline Marcelle

Pauline Marcelle is a contemporary visual artist, born in the Commonwealth of Dominica, in the Caribbean.

She grew up both in Dominica and Brooklyn, New York. Her paintings are strongly expressive in which she connects the intensity of modern art with the expressivity and figuration of her Caribbean origin, using digital means to fuse paintings and photography on a contemporary context.

In 2000, she completed her studies in Fine Art at University for Applied and Contempory Arts in Vienna, Austria, where she obtained an MFA in Painting, Graphics and Trick Film Animation. Marcelle currently lives and works in both Vienna and Dominica but has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in Austria, Switzerland, Holland, USA and Dominica. Pauline Marcelle has also recently completed a four months residency at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"My work covers painting and video and reflects the thematic subject of human meetings and encounters; their variety, interaction and influential effects of their social surrounding, to which human beings are subjected. My paintings derive from photographs and the series BEND DOWN BOUTIQUE is based on my journey to Ghana, taking me to the coastlines where piles of t-shirts, trousers, textiles, fisherman’s nets, shoes, ropes and contents of the ocean formed sculptural bodies of sea washed debris on the beach. The term BEND DOWN BOUTIQUE or second hand clothes in itself, narrates the journey and destiny of the wares from the many relief establishments of the waste-oriented society, to the street vendors in poorer countries around the word and sometimes transported back to the USA and Europe by refugees, turning the charity phenomenon a paradox on the roadside markets and on the shores and coastlines of the developing nations, where progress and poverty go hand in hand."