Polypi, 2026

Hélène Legrand  

Following the example of her father, Hélène Legrand embraced a career as a painter... From him also came a love of the sea and our national navy. As a child, she accompanied him on his Sunday studies at the maritime museum.

Her studies at the UER of plastic art in Paris 1 during the 1980s intended her to produce concepts rather than easel painting deemed obsolete by the radical moderns who taught. It was clear that after Duchamp “we could no longer paint"!...

However, his path diverged: his encounter with the thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss was decisive: preservation, transmission became the challenge of his work and the concern of seeing painting become "a lost profession", a "severe loss", the driving force of a necessity to represent the world in painting.

Since then, in the place of the painting, she has tried to "trap" in the ambush of representation what is threatened with disappearance from the world with a clear predilection for silent instances: abandoned subjects of the history of art in one firstly then the animal, the plant and the landscape in the living experience of reality.

Phenomenology has been supporting this work for several years (Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henry Maldiney in particular) in that it allows us to restore a continuity of meaning to the temporal movement of attention: grasping through the gaze, without tearing it away from the together, “the thing itself" in its inexhaustible permanence.

In 2018, following the 44th Marine Show, she received the insignia of Marine Painter, a high military distinction whose number is limited to 20 painters, and which only 5 women have had the honor of receiving in 2 centuries.

Hélène Legrand has exhibited since 1980 in France and Europe and her works are in numerous private and public collections. She lives and works in the Paris region.