Marie-Chloé Duval

Human Jungle 05

2023

Marie-Chloé Duval is a Canadian-born, New York–based visual artist, educator, and arts leader with a distinguished international career. Since committing to painting full-time in 2016, she has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across North America and Europe, received multiple awards, and completed prestigious artist residencies. Beyond her studio practice, Duval is a dedicated advocate for the arts: she has served on multiple boards, curated exhibitions, led community initiatives, and founded an alternative art space that champions emerging and underrepresented artists. She is also an educator, teaching fine arts at Wagner College and mentoring across age groups and disciplines. Duval holds degrees in Criminology (BA, MA), a BFA from Concordia University, and an MFA from the New York Studio School, combining rigorous scholarship with a visionary approach to contemporary art practice. Art statement Working in oil paint and oil pastels my practice explores the invisible social structures that shape how we move, relate, and belong. Informed by my background in criminology and my ongoing series Architecture of Human Ties, I investigate the boundaries, systems, and norms that quietly organize contemporary life—forces that connect us while simultaneously fragmenting experience. Working across painting and drawing, I construct layered surfaces where gestures emerge, dissolve, and reappear, suggesting the instability beneath what appears fixed. Positioned between figuration and abstraction, my work merges architectural order with organic growth, reflecting the tension between individual presence and collective condition. Figures surface as traces—partial, anonymous, fleeting—embedded within spatial environments that evoke both memory and movement. Through strategies of construction, obstruction, and erasure, each composition becomes a psychological landscape shaped by time, perception, and social pressure. Rooted in observation yet guided by intuition, my practice reflects on human connection within systems of control, revealing society as fluid, negotiated, and continuously in transformation.