Fabienne Lasserre

Fabienne Lasserre blurs boundaries: between painting and sculpture, body and space, color and form. Known for her large-scale work that has filled museums, civic spaces, and galleries worldwide, Lasserre’s intimate Pitchables series invites viewers to engage in a physical, personal way. Rejecting absolutes, each artwork draws attention to the fluidity inherent within our worldviews and conceptions of self.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

You've had some great career milestones recently, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship, a major public works commission in your hometown of Montreal. How do these moments of recognition feel?

Fabienne Lasserre

They feel good. I've often worked without deadlines or without precise projects or recognition and I value that I can make work regardless of any of that. But of course, getting a grant, getting some support is wonderful. It's nice, because some things can't just happen without other people participating to some extent. With grants, you can make a bigger project. It feels good, but it also enables larger pieces or collaboration with other people.

Tell us about your practice.

I'm a—you think that's an easy question, but it's not because I often say I'm a sculptor, but I also sometimes say I'm a painter because my pieces blend both or overlap the two. Sometimes I call them 2D sculptures or 3D paintings. I studied painting, I taught painting for decades. I look a lot at painting, it's kind of my medium of reference, but I've never made real, quote-unquote painting, as in flat canvases on the wall. Every time I tried, appendages started sprouting out or I cut the canvas. It was always an intervention into the tradition of painting. I like to describe my practice is trying to expand what counts as painting. Does 3D count as painting? I say, yes. What I understand painting is mostly defined by—is color. Traditionally painting has been often defined by flatness and the rectangle, and I don't agree with that definition.

Your color choices are very bold and unique. How do you approach color?

When I build a sculpture, I'll weld the armature first and that part is very planned out. But color is never planned, I always work it out on the piece without sketches or pre-made decisions. I have an idea that is very clear about the mood I want to convey, or sometimes I just know when it works. It gets figured out as I go.

Color for me is completely relational. It's always dependent on what's beside it. You can't really tell when a red becomes a purple or when that purple becomes a blue. To me, that carries a lot of metaphors about how we can't actually divide things as strictly as we think. I think color carries a lot of political metaphors in terms of thinking outside of binaries or rigid ways of thinking. That, to me, is the richness of color in terms of meaning. It also is something you see, and then you have an after-image you carry with you once you're not looking at the piece. It's very intangible, but it's something we perceive with and carrying within our bodies.

What themes does your work return to over time?

Feminism has been a constant since I was young and making art early on—my art has always been influenced by my feminist ethics. That is why my approach to art making was about inventing bodies or exploring multiple senses, and also making things that are between categories and that don't quite fit. Making a work that is not a painting and not a sculpture—that is a mix of the two, not easy to pinpoint—is akin to contesting the definitions of a female body or a male body or another body. And why would you accept these definitions? That has always been a thread.

What was your path into art?

I always wanted to be an artist. I didn't always know that I could. There were many years of—do I have what it takes? I decided I would just try and study and if I didn't have what it takes, I could always do something else.

As far as I can remember, I was always making things and I loved to draw and paint. I studied painting but I never could make paintings that I liked, or that carried the weight or affect that I wanted them to have. I have a theory about this: I love painting, but I don't like composition. To me, composition involves stepping back and judging—a preconceived notion about how things should work. I love the parts of painting that are color, material, tactile, physical, but not the part that involves placement in a rectangle. That's a retroactive understanding of my failure to make good paintings, until I actually made them with three-dimensional elements, or appendages, or whatever I did to make painting a little different.

When did you first call yourself an artist?

Compared to my students now, I called myself an artist much later. I'm talking to freshmen who already talk about their "practice." It took me many years after undergrad. I would paint in the day and waitress at night. And eventually, I called myself an artist.

Were you surrounded by art when you were young?

My mom was the director of a printmaking gallery when I was growing up. She was not an artist herself, but she organized shows and ran the gallery. Her gallery also published prints and there were five floors of print shops and artists working there. It was amazing—lithography, etching, all the printmaking techniques. As kids, my brother and I went to all the openings and we also worked with some of the artists. My mother would ask them to show us how to make prints. I also worked in the gallery as a teenager and spent a lot of time manipulating those prints.

What does it mean to be an artist and a parent?

When I had my daughter, it was just so much easier to make work, to make decisions. It was not only easier, but it was richer, with a different perspective on life and death and fragility and priorities.

Lou comes into the studio a lot. She's even made parts of the pieces. Especially during the pandemic, I would just give her a piece to paint on. I knew that if I wasn't interested in the results, I could paint over them. But then she made amazing painting moves so I kept several. And she very proudly, when the pieces were in a show, told everybody which part she made. Other times, she reproaches me because I covered up the parts she painted.

If you had a time machine, what would you tell your former self when you were first starting out?

I might find a way to make my former self understand that whatever I was thinking then was rich enough to sustain a whole life of being an artist, because it has come back. It's been so remarkably consistent, the preoccupations. I just turned 50, and when I think of works that I made in my early 20s, the preoccupations are similar. I could even show the works now, not as masterpieces, but because they completely makes sense with what I'm thinking today. It's not that I had a lack of confidence in my ideas then, but I didn't realize how you could dig and dig into an idea.

When we met at Columbia’s MFA program, you were creating magical creatures that drew on your own mythology. How has your work evolved?

Yes, I was very interested in mythology and science fiction and it's still a big influence. Science fiction and myth are really good at unraveling categories and rigid classifications and that's what I like about them. They mix categories, they mix bodies . . . Myths and sci-fi are full of monsters and creatures that are a mix of male and female, human and animal attributes. To me, that is ripe with meaning—bodies that exist outside of rigid categories and our usual modes of understanding bodies. Back then, I made dragons and creatures, with combined attributes that were also kind of garish and pop and really colorful and unbehaved.

Those interests are still very much with me. I'm still interested in the politics of the body, of thinking of our bodies in a way that mind doesn't dominate necessarily, or rationality doesn't dominate emotions, or sight doesn't override touch. A less hierarchical conception of our bodies, of human and non-human bodies. I'm still interested very in that, but it has taken a form that is less figurative. I'm also interested now in the positions of the body of the person or people viewing the piece, how you walk around them, how you look at the pieces as a moving human being.

You’ve explored the body since early in your practice. We were talking earlier about your daughter's birthday and our parents being ill or passing, and the way that our bodies change as we sit in this middle-aged place. Has that influenced your work?

I don't know yet, but I'm thinking about it a lot. It's funny, feminism has been such a shaping influence for me for so long. And recently I was thinking—age, aging and death, it’s almost more important to the way we understand people, bodies, identity. I find it fascinating that it barely occurred to me before, whereas now I find it completely central to everything. So I don't know how it affects my work or what it changes, but I know I'm reflecting on that. Aging, frailty, illness, vulnerability, death—these unite us much more than they divide us, but it’s seldom talked about, especially in the context of identity politics. These are new thoughts for me.

Are there artists who you think your work is in conversation with?

There's a certain set of artists I think of when I work. Ann Truitt is one, for the presence of her colors. Her sculptures are very simple cubic shapes. But her color often exists outside of her pieces—she plays with the way color floats far away from a piece or hovers around a piece in a really beautiful way.

Another interesting artist is Vivian Suter, who works in Guatemala. She has a studio where doors don't really shut, there's no glass on the windows, so animals come in and out and there's the jungle all around it. There are paw prints on the paintings, and earth, and sticks. Her shapes are so simple, almost archetypal shapes—a cylinder, a spiral, or an oval, but done with brushstrokes that are not trying to be grand. They are very down to earth, scratchy and messy and not polished. The color resonates. She hangs large, unstretched canvases in the middle of the room, in clusters, in layers, rarely on the wall. The whole room is a composition for her.

There is also Michelle Segrè. She makes large, rounded sculptures, using wool, aqua-resin, ceramics. They're really beautiful, kind of solar-like sculptures, giant star-fish or funky planets. One of her bodies of work has carrots and toasts hanging from the wool threads—goofy, cartoony elements nestled into these very abstract pieces. It's both funny and kind of gross, crusty. I love their weirdness and expansiveness.

Do you have a mantra or philosophy that guides you?

My friend always quotes me saying, “easy is not lazy.” I’ve learned over the years not to think that if you work harder, it's better. That sometimes things that come naturally are the best. And that you shouldn't default to an overly Protestant work ethic, because that doesn't always yield the best results in art.

What are your thoughts on the role of art today, at this particular moment in time?

I think it's very important to value the experience we have when we are in direct relation to people, objects, and settings. We are so much on our screens, we have a flattened experience, perceptually, of so many things. It's not the only role of art, of course, but it is one that seems more and more urgent—to provide a time and space to "un-flatten" experience, make it richer, slower, thicker. I think it's a really rich experience to be in front of something that doesn't exist elsewhere, and to trust what that experience gives you.

What do you hope for someone who has your work their home?

I really love when someone says, "Oh, I look at the piece and it always shows me something different." It's the best thing art can do, or what I value the most—something different every time, or rewarding slow-looking, closer-looking. You see it differently when you're in a different mood, as you change, etc. For me, it's the best thing you can get from living with a piece of art.

What does Friday mean to you?

Friday is the last day before the weekend—it's full of excitement.

About the Artist

Fabienne Lasserre grew up in Montreal and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the Director of the interdisciplinary MFA in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She received her B.F.A. from Concordia University (1996) and her M.F.A. from Columbia University, New York (2004).

Lasserre has exhibited her work consistently in Canada, the US and internationally. Her most recent solo exhibition, Listeners (2024, the Athenaeum, Athens, GA) received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Other solo projects include With What Eyes (2023, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto), Eye Contact (2021, Turn Gallery, New York), Make Room for Space (2018, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY), and Les Larmes (2018, Parisian Laundry, Montreal).

She has exhibited her work in group shows at Essex Flowers, White Columns (both 2022, New York); The Tang Museum (2021, Saratoga Springs, NY); CPM Gallery (2021, Baltimore); Ceysson & Bénétière (2017, Luxembourg); C.Ar.D Palazzo Costa Tretenerro (2015, Piacenza, Italy); Contemporary Arts Museum (2013, Houston, TX); Museo de Antioquia (2013, Medellin, Colombia); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2011), among others.

Lasserre is the recipient of a Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship (2017) and a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award (2016). In 2013 and 2014, she received Project Grants to Visual Artists from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work appears in numerous private and public collections such as the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec (MNABQ), the Birmingham Museum Art collection and the Claridge Collection of Canadian Art.