About Ma Ani's work
Ma Ani (Annie Paulhus Gosselin) is a multidisciplinary visual artist born in Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec, in an entrepreneurial family. Initially self-taught, she later deepened her practice at UQAT and earned her BFA in Visual Arts from the Université de Sherbrooke in 2020.
Coming from a background in art therapy and literature, she made a notable entrance onto the art scene in 2017 with her first solo exhibition at L’Écart (Rouyn-Noranda). This happened only one year after she touched a paintbrush for the first time. Since then, her work has been showcased throughout Québec and internationally, including four major contemporary art fairs in London, New York and Seattle.
Her signature method, which she calls Geometric Blur, is rooted in a figurative hard-edge approach executed with near-obsessive precision. Each piece includes between 80 and 120 distinct acrylic colors applied in flat planes and distributed across countless zones meticulously masked with tape. The extreme meticulousness of this process requires hundreds of hours for each painting. The result is a visual paradox: a perfectly controlled surface that produces an emotionally blurred and often disorienting image.
Ma Ani employs a bold, multi-layered pictorial technique that merges abstraction and figuration. She uses acrylics to build sharply defined color fields structured through angular transitions instead of soft gradients. This mosaic-like approach flattens depth and places emphasis on the surface. Each section of the painting vibrates autonomously while contributing to a coherent whole.
Diagnosed with Asperger’s autism, Ma Ani considers painting both an act of self-assertion and a tool for emotional regulation. Silence is unbearable to her, so she creates while listening to more than one hundred audiobooks per year, including Zweig’s biographies, forensic science texts, political essays and crime novels. These stories resonate throughout her work and leave a tangible imprint.
Since 2020, her career has taken a distinctly commercial turn: 76 sold, a growing presence in galleries and a consistent rise in the value of her pieces. Works from her The Dress series were selected by government curators at the Québec delegation in London and highlighted by the leadership of the Affordable Art Fair in New York.
Ma Ani has been represented by galleries in Québec and Toronto, and she now works full-time from her studio in Knowlton, Québec.