May 29 to July 12 2025
Recognized for her rich and varied career in both visual arts and costume design for stage and film, Martine Bertrand has developed a practice that weaves together memory, material, and imagination. Her work unfolds in a constant dialogue between manual gesture, texture, and the materiality of textiles, giving rise to abstract and distinctive compositions. Through techniques such as embroidery, collage, drawing, and printmaking, she creates delicate, emotionally resonant works that evoke both the body and the inner world.
At La Guilde, she presents a new series for the first time, inspired by a recent stay in Budapest. Created using mixed media—including embroidery, weaving, and collage—these pieces take the form of aerial views, like imaginary cartographies. Drawing from urban landscapes, architecture, atmospheres, and encounters, she constructs mental and sensory territories where reality is reshaped through intuition and memory. Thread becomes a line of thought, an intimate path, a trace of a lived and dreamed experience.
Martine Bertrand works organically, guided by a tactile relationship with her materials and a deep sensitivity to the rhythms of the hand. Her background in couture and dedication to artisanal techniques are reflected in the precision of her embroidery and the richness of her textures. Each piece becomes an inhabited space, a fragment of a world to contemplate.
The exhibition also features two emblematic works from 2022: La robe qui chante and Robe Soleil, textile works on paper that combine ink drawing, embroidery, and dry pigments.
Histoires tirées par les fils invites viewers on an introspective journey through a universe where materials speak, and the artist’s vibrant imagination takes shape through the energy of her creative gesture.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Martine Bertrand is a visual artist of the Montreal region whose career also blooms internationally. Her first medium being textile, she created, early in her career, dance costumes for opera houses such as the Milan Teatro alla Scalla, the Paris National Opera, the Munich Opera, The Stuttgart Opera and the Norway Opera.
It’s with the Alberta Ballet that she signs the costumes of the ballet about the life of Sir Elton John, Love Lies Bleeding. A new artistic wind brings her to draw on the plateau of Café de Flore by Jean-Marc Vallée and her sketches are published in the book about the creation of the movie with Éditions Alto.
All while continuing her personal production, Martine Bertrand creates for the cinema industry. She notably worked with Denis Villeneuve for whom she conceived the graphical language of the extraterrestrials in the movie Arrival, as well as murals and decorative elements of the sets of the movies Dune and Dune: Part Two. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Montreal and Toronto. She also participated in the collective exhibition Designs for Different Futures presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center à Minneapolis. Her works are part of public and private collections including the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec, the city of Longueuil and the Sun Life Firm.