Marie Ducaté
Born in 1954, lives and works in Marseille, France
Marie Ducaté's works move between the figurative and the abstract and play lightly with paint, moving it from canvas to ceramics, fabric, metal, glass or tracing paper.
A graduate of the Beaux-Arts d'Aix in 1980, Marie Ducaté began exhibiting in 1984 and has not stopped showing her work in solo and group exhibitions in France and abroad. She has also obtained various grants and residencies and has produced several works in public spaces. In 2019, Marie Ducaté will have two major solo exhibitions, which will be published in catalogs: Anguille sous roche at the Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme in Aix-en-Provence, and Ondulations at the Musée Mandet in Riom.
His painting work is at first in contrast to the Figuration Libre, painting naked men in domestic interiors, and summoning numerous historical references but with a determination to "get close" to the foundations of modernity with humor. Without regard for genre, his frames are inspired by English sculpture, while his compositions evoke Raoul Dufy, Pierre Bonnard or Henri Matisse, mixing naive characters, flat areas with awkward contours and games with transparency and the negative spaces of painting.
Over the years, Marie Ducaté's research has shifted towards abstraction and has come closer to the Decorative Arts through "crossroads, in interlacing light, pearls and glass "1. In 2004, she exhibited the Lumigloo sculpture in Collection Blachère in Apt, a two-meter half-sphere made of beads, LEDs, and blown glass. Then in 2008, during an exhibition at the FRAC PACA in Montbéliard, her work Les Oiseaux erects a large cylinder of transparent curtains covered with dreamlike birds painted in transparency. The later use of drawing and also of earthenware led her work towards fables, tales, and legends, and brings her works closer to Annie Albers, Sonia Delaunay, or even the universe of the Blooms Bury Group.