MARIE- CHARLOTTE PORTER
Marie-Charlotte Porter
I often feel less as though I am inventing these figures than slowly uncovering them.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Marie-Charlotte Porter is a Dutch-American contemporary surrealist painter working between New York and Palm Beach. Raised in London, New York, and Switzerland, she trained in drawing at the Art Students League of New York and studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Her work has been exhibited in London and New York, including her installation IMAGINE, which was featured by Time Out Magazine.Working primarily in oil paint and charcoal, Marie-Charlotte creates an imagined world populated by hybrid beings assembled from human, organic, mechanical, and architectural forms. Her work explores transformation, contradiction, and the unexpected relationships that emerge between seemingly incompatible things.
Artist Statement
My paintings explore an imagined world that exists somewhere between the familiar and the impossible. Its inhabitants are hybrid beings made from fragments of the human body, plants, machinery, architecture, ornament, and other recurring forms.
Working primarily in oil paint and charcoal, I do not begin with a fixed narrative. The figures develop through an intuitive and accumulative process of drawing, erasure, repetition, and chance, gradually revealing their own character and internal logic as I work.
I often feel less as though I am inventing these beings than slowly uncovering them. I am interested in the moment when seemingly unrelated parts begin to feel like a single being, even when the result remains awkward, fragile, funny, or strange.
This world is shaped by contradiction. The mechanical and organic, crude and elegant, tender and unsettling are allowed to coexist. The figures are often drawn toward one another, and that pull has become central to the work. I think of love as a physical force in this world, something like gravity, binding together things that might otherwise remain separate.
Ultimately, I am interested in the delicate boundary between the absurd and the beautiful, and in the possibility that even the strangest forms can evoke something deeply familiar: the desire to connect, to belong, and to love.
