Julia Huteau (b. 1982, Lorient, France) studied at the Quimper School of Applied Arts from 1997 to 1999 before continuing her ceramics education in Vaucluse, where she learned primitive forms, techniques, and firing. She later graduated from the Maison de la Céramique de Dieulefit in 2007. Now based in the Drôme region, she has focused on sculpture since 2017, exploring plump, organic forms and the interplay of color and light.
Her solo exhibition Agrandissement at the Centre Contemporain de La Borne in 2019 marked a turning point, shifting her practice from object-making to spatial experience. That same year, she presented Blue as an Orange at Art Mart gallery in Shanghai. In 2020, the Musée National des Arts Décoratifs acquired two of her De l’espace entre les couleurs sculptures, later exhibited in Un printemps incertain (2021). Works from the same series were shown at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in Par le feu, la couleur (2021–22).
Residencies play a key role in her practice. In 2020, she was awarded the “Recherches et Création” residency at Craft Limoges, leading to the Luminance project, supported by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques. She later completed the Rebound project through the Traversées grant, exhibiting at Salon de Sculpture Contemporaine C14 in Paris. Her work has been included in the Officine Saffi competition (Milan, 2021) and the Toucher Terre exhibition at Fondation Datris (2022).
Recent solo exhibitions include Vleu (Mouans-Sartoux, 2021), Jaunt (imprints-Galerie, 2021), and Vrouge (Galerie Tator, 2022), part of Lyon’s Biennale d’Art Contemporain. She was invited to La couleur at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montélimar (2022). In 2024, she participated in Pré… at the Maison de la Céramique de Dieulefit and presented Luminance at the Bourse du Travail, supported by the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles, the Ville de Valence, and Lux Valence.
Visit Julia Huteau’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2020-2024
My artistic universe is formal and concrete.
I propose sculptures of plump shapes and colors. The main lines of my work are research and amusement, the multiple choices and selections that flow from them determine my work. A second reading allows the viewer to discern my influences: the Philosophies of Science, Physics, Light and Space. The limit of possibilities, from the viewpoints of physics and philosophy, is an extraordinary creative tool: it’s the starting point for the different sculptures I propose.
The outdoor settings and staging of color-volumes, archived by photography and videos, are like confrontations with the elements. Today, they lead me to envisage a change of scale in the works and to carry out sculptural research using other materials. This research is looking elsewhere. The work is invented as it goes along in relation to the scenario. It seeks to define itself without restrictions : the shapes are placed there, but where do they really come from, and how did they get here?
