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Biography
Catherine Ducreux : sculptor of avant-garde
There is no point looking for a chronological order in Catherine Ducreux’s work. Styles and subjects do not fit obediently into periods or stages – her work does not follow a particular trend as it advances and no particular reasoning can be seen in her progression.

She sculpts as she feels, shapes the stone as she wishes and fashions the clay as she sees fit. She crafts her creatures in delight – the postures of a belly dancer, the pranks of a clown-musician, the dreaminess of bathers, stripped to the waist. For her, it all has to do with principles and proportions rather than style, it is a question of oval hips, cylindrical necks and arms, colossal thighs and prominent stomachs, gentle figurines that she enhances with sharp, bright colors. Plaster, terracotta and bronze figures in her particular classic style prove that she is aware of her Greek and Renaissance predecessors. The marble is polished, the bronze is warm, the clay suggests the texture of the skin in her nudes and her mother and child groups.

She doesn’t really worry about repeating her subjects, she just wants the latest one to carry all the sensuality of her curves and attitudes. Would this be an admission of a lack of persistence?
If the truth be told, she delights in a sort of rebellion that hides the real influences to her creativity and her origins from all but the most observant onlooker. For she transfers the geometrical women of Henri Laurens and the elliptic figures of Manolo (her spiritual masters) to stone and clay. In her preparatory drawings that evolve sometimes as a sketch, sometimes as a rehearsal to her work, she seeks to attain the talent of her father, a man who was a brilliant musician and who produced a multitude of drawings.

Indeed, when she was thirty, she was extremely interested in Negro art, the Romanian Constantin Brancusi and the Englishman Henry Moore. At that particular time, in 1983, she certainly drew from them her blend of gentle,
pure eroticism and a sort of spontaneous, simple flight of fancy that expresses itself in the generous curves of her nymphs on holiday with Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot and in the embraces of her goddess-mothers so full of their disconcerting charms that we would swear they were all Venus from the Cyclades. From that point of view, her sculpture will always be avant-garde, like the Cycladic statuettes in Naxos.

Claude Darras, Art critic