Samuelle Grande is a Canadian painter born and raised in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang-Montreal. Her practice engages with feelings, processes of thoughts and sensations. Grande’s work emerges through gesture, colour, and drawing-based procedures. She weaves experiences and observations from her daily life with images sourced from anonymous scrapbooks, cinema and Western art history. They call to mind dream sequences and memories that overlap in painterly scenarios. She begins her paintings by creating drawings from memory, often at night lying in bed before bedtime. This horizontal pre-dream state of mind guides the freewheeling compositions of her works. In the studio, she employs these drawings as a jumping board for related paintings that eventually emerge via free associations.
Grande holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph (2023) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in Studio Arts from Concordia University (2019). She has exhibited her work in group and solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Guelph; Boarding House Gallery (Guelph) and Galerie Nicolas Robert (Toronto and Montreal). In 2024, she was an artist-in-residence at Fool’s Paradise, the Doris McCarthy residency (Scarborough). Grande is the recipient of several awards including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2024, 2023), the Canadian Federation of Women Graduate Award (2023) and the Tony Sherman Graduate Scholarship (2021).