Bio
Born in Paris in 1967, Marine de Soos has been a sculptor for nearly 35 years. She has established herself on the contemporary art scene in France and abroad with her bronze works imbued with humanity, delicacy, and poetry.
Her work bears its signature in the subtle evocation of the emotions that emanate from her sculptures, giving them an almost lifelike presence.
Trained alongside the American sculptor Jonathan Hirschfeld, she has developed a unique and highly personal style that draws its inspiration from the African continent, where she spent part of her childhood, and from the memories of her many travels in Asia, blending her imagination with her perception of the fleeting beauty of life’s moments.
She also creates monumental works and responds to private and institutional commissions.
Since 1999, her work has been exhibited on a permanent basis in galleries, at fairs and biennials, in prestigious venues or exceptional gardens. Her works are acquired both in France and abroad.
She lives and works in Paris.
Anne Doridou-Heim
Art historian, journalist, and exhibition curator
Marine de Soos is what she sculpts; her work and herself are one. She dissolves into it, forgetting the frame of the studio, the walls that surround her, to find herself on the shores of a lake in Ethiopia or in Burma, as in the first mornings of the world.
There, she touched upon wisdom and universality; upon her return, she must transcribe them, with the exacting standards that define her.
All her sculptures carry us along in their motionless journey.
They bear within them a form of meditation born of interiority and an immense emotion.
Faces from here and elsewhere, from yesterday and today, merge as they stand at the crossroads of different cultures.
The gestures are ancestral; they were seen and then retained in order to be transcribed. The fixed scenes, bearing witness to both simplicity and authenticity, have been lived; they give off a poetry imbued with nostalgia.
Hélène Jousse
Writer and artist
Where does this impression come from that the sculptures of Marine de Soos are suspended? And that, with them, it is the course of time itself that suspends its inexorable trajectory? They are wholly absorbed in what they are doing, even when they are doing nothing.
Our gaze, as it crosses their paths, comes to rest—and in turn rests us. To look at them is, in a way, to enter into meditation.
Marine de Soos requires her sculptures to do for us what nature has always done for her: to give meaning and gentleness.
Her sculptures are anything but immobile. We think we see them in motion; our mind instinctively reconstructs both the before and the after of what is given to be seen.
Their lines of flight are axes that extend, telling us that reality is always outside the frame, that what is essential remains invisible.
Her sculpture is a form in expansion, a kind of miniature universe. Movement,
movement once again.
Ludovic Bourdié
Collector
The eye of Marine de Soos, her hand, allow us to see the invisible, another texture of time.
Sensory sculpture, sculpture of movement, the poetics of Marine de Soos’s work are those of the “prose of everyday life,” as an antidote to the imposture of time.
The acuity of the gaze, the perfect mastery of the gesture, become an offering so as to be nothing but presence in the world, a conversion of the gaze that ineffably opens within us like a path toward the light, a door onto a discreet, veiled truth. Veiled in the silence of humility.
What Marine de Soos offers us is the modest expression, an injunction that is both ethical and aesthetic, of her union with the soul of the world.