Grande Espérance, 2023

Sophie Barut  

Sophie Barut (born in 1972) is a contemporary French sculptor, renowned for her bronze sculptures created using the traditional lost-wax casting technique. She lives and works in Caluire-et-Cuire, near Lyon. Before dedicating herself fully to sculpture, she worked for eighteen years as an interior architect, after graduating from the Lyon School of Applied Arts.

She discovered sculpture after the age of forty, drawn to the timeless nature of bronze and its power to express human emotion through form and material. Her work is deeply figurative and expressive, capturing simple gestures, authentic postures, and emotionally charged, suspended moments. The themes she explores include fragility, childhood, disability, tenderness, love, friendship, and resilience.

Her sculptures are modeled entirely by hand, using knives, razors, and fingertips, leaving the traces of the creative process visible on the surface. She embraces a raw aesthetic, rejecting hyperrealism in favor of genuine emotion and expressive texture. A recurrent motif in her work is a small bird, placed delicately on her figures, symbolizing companionship, courage, and hope.

Her artistic approach took on new depth following a life-changing personal event: her husband's accident and resulting paraplegia. This experience deeply informed her work, infusing it with a sense of inner strength and renewal.

Recipient of the City of Saint-Chamond Prize, she has exhibited in numerous art salons and galleries throughout France, including in Lyon, Roanne, Grenoble, and Cuiseaux. Her sculptures are now part of various public collections, and her emotionally resonant creations are celebrated by collectors and cultural institutions alike.

Among her signature series are La petite baigneuse, Les tourtereaux, Petites reines, and Le grand lecteur, tender and powerful representations of poetic moments in everyday life.