"The Recline of Authority" Painting

Célia Mourier is a French-born artist currently based in Glasgow. Her artistic practice is deeply contemporary, engaging with themes such as gender, vulnerability, and transformation. She primarily works with acrylics, ink, pastel, and fire, combining elements of control and chaos in her mark-making. Her paintings often reinterpret bodies and identities through techniques of distortion, fragmentation, and layering, employing a Cubist–Fauvist style characterized by vivid, stained-glass-like color planes. This approach allows Mourier to explore complex cultural archetypes and challenge traditional representations, particularly in her series "Fragments of Masculinity," which examines male vulnerability and the performance of gender roles. Living across four continents has influenced Mourier’s perspective, enriching her exploration of identity, migration, and belonging. Her process is intuitive yet grounded in psycho-emotional inquiry, reflecting a commitment to art as a means of resistance, repair, and visibility for marginalized narratives. Through her work, Célia Mourier invites viewers to reconsider assumptions and find beauty in disruption rather than perfection, using rupture and reconstruction as metaphors for resilience and transformation.