Le poulpe, 2022

Marie Hugo  

Marie Hugo is a French painter, engraver, lithographer, and plastic artist born in 1951 in Petite Camargue. Daughter of the painter Jean Hugo and great-great-granddaughter of Victor Hugo, she grew up in an environment deeply marked by artistic creation. At the age of sixteen, she joined the École nationale des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier, where she studied engraving and lithography, while working in her father's studio. This dual training nourishes an exacting practice of drawing and gesture, which remains at the heart of her work. After her studies, she settles in Hong Kong, where she participates in the creation of large mural paintings for public commissions. This stay in East Asia has permanently influenced her plastic language and her relationship to space, void, and nature.

Returning to Europe in the 1980s, Marie Hugo develops a singular body of work where Western pictorial traditions dialogue with the aesthetic principles of Asian art. Her work favors Chinese ink, mineral pigments, gesso, tempera, wash, as well as engraving and mixed media techniques. Inspired by Eastern philosophy and Chinese painting, she explores the notions of balance between full and empty, movement and respiration. Her universe oscillates between figuration and abstraction, bringing to the fore bamboos, lotuses, leaves, stones, waters, insects, octopuses, plant landscapes, and organic forms that evoke the fragility of life. Water, ink, and pigment become living materials, leaving a wide space for controlled chance and the spontaneity of gesture.

In parallel with her painting, Marie Hugo creates monumental installations that extend her reflection on nature and impermanence. In 2007, she created a large-scale installation at the Château de Haroué (Meurthe-et-Moselle). In 2015, she designed an ephemeral monumental work in the Arènes d'Arles on the occasion of the Corrida Goyesque, a drawing made on sand then erased by the passage of horses and bullfighters, echoing the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence. She also develops the series of Forests of light, composed of large canvases mounted in columns, as well as the Medusa sculpture, made of metal mesh, where light, water, and transparency dialogue with space.

Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in France and internationally, notably in London, New York, Tokyo, Sète, at the Gallifet Art Center in Aix-en-Provence, as well as at the Château de Haroué. Her works are featured in many private collections in Europe and the United States. In parallel with her artistic career, Marie Hugo co-founded the Society of Friends of Victor Hugo in 2000, which she chaired until 2006, contributing to the enhancement of the cultural heritage of her illustrious ancestor. Through the richness of her plastic language and her constant dialogue between East and West, Marie Hugo is today established as a major figure in contemporary painting, lyrical abstract art, ink painting, contemporary engraving, and installation, developing a poetic work where nature, memory, and gesture occupy an essential place.