Lambert’s work revolves around a persistent exploration of the notion of matter, conceived both as tangible substance and as an invisible, spiritual, or energetic force that exceeds its simple materiality. Painting thus becomes a field of investigation where the sensory and the immaterial converge. The act of painting, deeply physical and intuitive, lies at the heart of her practice; it is the space where abstraction, intuition, and lived experience meet.
Lambert’s thinking unfolds in an arborescent manner, through associations and branching connections. She conceives her canvases as fragments of a sentence: a shift in context, form, or relationship can completely transform their meaning. Attentive to the many forms of communication, the artist considers words as carriers of history, while images possess, in her view, an even greater capacity for intuition and universality.
Her compositions unfold within familiar yet subtly displaced environments, where everyday elements coexist with fantastical or incongruous details. These ambiguous spaces disrupt ordinary frameworks of perception and open a field where the boundaries between the real and the imaginary oscillate between recognition and estrangement. Informed by her personal trajectory, Lambert’s practice develops through narratives that are both poetic and humorous, often infused with a discreet irony and occasionally tinged with a gently dystopian atmosphere.
Carried by a vibrant chromatic palette, Lambert’s pictorial worlds open onto broader, more universal resonances. Within these contemporary compositions, décor, reality, fantasy, and fiction intertwine, offering a layered exploration of life, matter, and the strange, sometimes magical, connections that bind them.
Sylvie Lambert was born and raised in Montreal. She graduated from Concordia University in 2006 with a degree in Studio Arts and a minor in ceramics. She then moved to Europe to study at HEAD – Genève, Geneva University of Art and Design, where she obtained the equivalent of a master’s degree in 2008 in painting and drawing—a medium she has been practicing for over twelve years. After several years of teaching, notably in preparatory art programs, she decided in 2021, following the COVID period, to dedicate herself fully to her artistic career. A major art center in Lancy selected her and awarded her a grant to produce her second solo exhibition, the first having taken place several years earlier at the Musée-Château d’Annecy. Since then, her work has been regularly presented at major European art fairs, including Art Paris and Art Genève. Her work was recently the subject of a significant solo exhibition at Gowen Contemporary, which has represented the artist since 2023. Her works have also been shown in curated exhibitions alongside internationally recognized artists such as Nicolas Party, Alex Katz, Yayoi Kusama, Françoise Pétrovitch, Joana Vasconcelos, and Salvo. One of her works was selected to illustrate the second album of Simone Aubert, the recipient of the Swiss Music Prize.
