MARIECLAIRE ST JOHN - MELLEN

Marieclaire St John (b.1987 Milan, Italy) lives and works in New York City.

Marieclaire graduated from the University of Southern California in 2009 with a B.A. in Communication and Fine Art and began her career in art and fashion in Los Angeles.

MSJ moved to New York in 2011 where she attended graduate school at Parsons School of Design, worked as a designer at Ralph Lauren and founded her acclaimed label, DRESSHIRT as an homage to her painter’s uniform, a man’s shirt. 

In 2017 Marieclaire was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in the Art & Design category.

Marieclaire’s paintings examine the relationship between the body as it is experienced and the body as it is seen. Drawing on the visual economy of fashion illustration and the physicality of gestural painting, her work moves between the seductive clarity of an image and its dissolution.

Figures emerge through abbreviated contours, translucent layers, and overlapping forms, only to lose their coherence. A gesture suggests an anatomical feature before slipping into abstraction; the boundaries between bodies, and between body and surrounding space, remain unsettled. Beauty and distortion coexist, neither offering a more definitive account of the figure.

At the center of her practice is a persistent tension between appearance and sensation—between the image through which a body becomes recognizable and the experience that resists being pictured.