Jean Luc Oudry, Figurative Sculpture, 1990s, Painted Stoneware

Very nice piece in stoneware. Signed
In perfect condition

Jean-Luc Oudry was born in 1947 in Paris.

Former student of the college Notre-Dame de Bury, he settled in Bellaffaire (04) in 1978.

Self-taught, he devotes himself to sculpture with various materials (wood, stone, earth, etc...) and he exhibits in France and abroad. (England, Scotland, Belgium). His work meets a great success.

In an extremely elaborate technique, Oudry's works remind us of Bellmer's universe that he quotes with a very personal interpretation. He also conceives pieces in chamotte stoneware from an ancient universe that he revisits at leisure.

The Museum of the Hautes Alpes devoted a retrospective exhibition to him in 2005.


"To meet Jean Luc Oudry is to meet a landscape. A unique landscape in these Alpes-de-Hautes-Provence, however generous in remarkable sites. A landscape drawn, with monumental forms, as if reworked by a lost civilization which would have left there the pyramids of schist, a sculpted landscape, a geology which expresses with a strong evidence its long complexity.

An artist's landscape, in a way, where a village emerges on an eminence of this baroque and powerful relief. It is there that one finds, by looking well, in the quiet streets of Bellaffaire, the workshop of Jean-Luc Oudry...

Among the beautiful diversity of pieces gathered in the workshop, I was irresistibly captivated by bent female bodies, turned upside down, exhibited in a splendid impudence....

For simple forms, with transparent intentions, the chamotte clay, heavy and smooth, confers to the sculpture a reassuring classism, a collection status....

One also discovers nudes of clear clay, baked in its natural state, with their patina of hyperrealistic flesh pink, knotted bodies, disarticulated, fragmented like a Dubuffet, of an equivocal and falsely candid eroticism, following the example of the dolls of Bellmer ....

Beside the female figures, emerges a particularly complex figure of the works of Jean -Luc Oudry: the big wooden compositions, sophisticated assemblies which are like a synthesis of its research, which concentrate allusions, quotations, references (Tinguely, Spoerri, Picasso) and always a dose of humor and derision.

These are organic accumulations, which resemble meccanos of humanity, and of which one would like to be able to dismantle parts to understand the functioning as in life. These large works punctuate in a powerful way the path of the artist and, by their intention, as much as by their dimension confer to his work a scale where the monument has its place... "


Source " Denis Grandjean, director of the school of architecture of Nancy " Catalogue of the exhibition : Visit to Jean Luc Oudry