Sandra Chevrier is a Montréal-based Canadian pop/urban artist, known for her captivating portraits of women.

Chevrier first fell in love with art as a kid and rapidly became a self-taught artist. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Visual and Media Arts from UQAM (Université du Québec in Montréal). When her son was born, she quit her job as a chef in a sushi restaurant to fully dedicate her life to her son and to art.

At first, Sandra Chevrier drew sketches of eyes, calling herself a “gaze collector”, an obsession which is still highly visible in her present work. When she paints, the artist starts drawing the eyes of her female characters, thus revealing their emotions and sensibility. She then adds on their faces layers from the superheroes world, partially covering their faces like a mask and hiding their feelings and flaws. Initially Chevrier directly stuck torn pages from comic books on the painted portraits, now she paints them with impressive realism. In this way, all of Chevrier’s portraits show a dichotomy between power and fragility and emotional enigma.

Her Cages series launched her career as an accomplished artist. From that moment, galleries have never ceased to offer her solo exhibitions, print releases have sold in seconds and celebrities like Alicia Keys contacted her to acquire her artworks.

The cages are definitely a feminist series as they symbolize women’s imprisonment, their limitations and the cages women have allowed to bar them from the fullness of life’s experience. Chevrier’s subjects denounce the role given to women and often show them in scenes of conflict, defeat and struggle.

Chevrier’s portraits play on the opposite concepts of power and fragility, freedom and captivity as well as reality and imagination, depicting women torn between the fantastical heroines of comic books and the oppressed female identity.