Michele Landel
Michele Landel
Michele Landel Biography
Michele Landel is an American artist who lives and works in Sèvres, France. She holds degrees in Fine Arts and Art History.
Her artwork has been exhibited throughout Europe, the UK, and the US and appears in The Collage Ideas Book (Ilex Press, 2018). She was awarded the 2018 Innovative Technique Award by the Surface Design Association and was a finalist for the Prix Carré-Sur-Seine in 2020. She has held residencies at Joya: AiR in Spain, NG Creative Art Residency in France, and the Centre Pompadour Neofeminist Laboratory in France.
Her artwork is currently available through Amelie, Maison d'art and the Ségolène Brossette Galerie in Paris, France, Le Salon Vert Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland, the Seager Gray Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Paradigm Gallery + Studio in Philadelphia, PA, and the Muriel Guépin Gallery in NYC, NY.
Landel creates beautifully eerie patchwork paintings using photography and thread.Whether draped or flattened, her embroidered bedsheets are about engaging the need and desire to look and the inherent power struggle between the one looking and the one being looked at. She stitches over figures, cut flowers, and domesticated spaces to evoke symbols of power, loss, memory, and struggles. Mirroring and shadows are also often repeated to show self-awareness and internal worlds. Drawing on the intimacy associated with stained and mended secondhand bedsheets and the machine embroidery connected with craft, her artwork references the domestic while also deliberately distancing itself from traditional fiber arts.
Michele Landel Description
Landel’s work, Winter Peonies represents the largest work we have had in the gallery. Along with the poem, she noted, she had also been thinking about Gerhard Richter’s flower series - hyper realistic and blurred at the same time, evoking the sense of a fleeting moment barely captured. Both Richter and Landel use their own photographs (the peonies are from Landel’s own garden). Usingher medium of embroidering photography on waxed fabric Landel is able to capture both the grandeur and ephemeral nature of the moments of our lives, the peonies appearing like moonlight in the gathering dark.