Zoé Ouvrier

Zoé Ouvrier, was born in 1975 in Montpellier. She is a French artist who graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2002. After 25 years in the capital, she now lives and works in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Ouvrier’s practice centers on engraving plywood, which she combines with painting and drawing to evoke the raw materiality of bark, skin, and the deep connection between nature and humanity.

Her poetic and tactile work explores the emotional resonance of trees, symbols of life, memory, and rootedness, often creating immersive environments that invite viewers into a sensorial dialogue. For over two decades, she has addressed themes of ecological imbalance and displacement, creating powerful visual narratives that reflect on our place in the natural world. Internationally recognized, her commissioned works often transform entire rooms into spaces for contemplation, where the viewer is invited to listen to the forest and feel the rhythm of the earth.

Artist’s creative work
In Zoé Ouvrier’s work, a deep curiosity for drawing meets a unique ability to translate nature into powerful visual forms, ranging from intimate panels to large-scale installations. Her refined woodcut technique, rooted in ancient Chinese and Japanese traditions, becomes a tool for sculpting imagination across dimensions.

Her approach is deeply connected to the concept of the rhizome, organic, ever-expanding, and intertwined. Initially drawn to anatomy and chiaroscuro, Ouvrier’s early figure studies gradually transformed into tree trunks, revealing an intuitive link between body and bark. Through the act of engraving, she enters a meditative state where the material itself begins to speak. Each gouge of the knife is both mark and memory, restoring voice and vitality to the wood.

For Ouvrier, plywood, an industrial, processed material, becomes a living skin, a vessel for expressing fragility, resilience, and the silent intelligence of trees. Her panels are not printed but meticulously carved, each incision forming a network of “cells” that evoke breath, wounds, and growth. Her work pays homage to the tree as a timeless symbol of life’s balance and vulnerability, confronting the violence of ecological exploitation while offering a vision of reconnection. With each piece, Ouvrier invites viewers into a world where nature speaks, breathes, and remembers.

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