Dominique Labauvie (French, b. 1948) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work exists within a minimalist sensibility deeply connected to the sublime. Both intellectually rigorous and physically demanding, his practice transforms steel into a linear sculptural language animated by space, balance, gravity, and suspension. Cut by hand, welded, and forged, the works occupy space with a rare tension between weight and levitation, as if negotiating a fragile equilibrium between structure and disappearance.
Although the natural landscape profoundly informs his work, Labauvie remains equally engaged with questions surrounding memory, environment, political tension, love, and the human condition. His sculptures move between drawing and architecture, mapping territory through line, rhythm, interruption, and breath.
Drawing and printmaking are fundamental to Labauvie’s sculptural vocabulary. Drawing functions not simply as preparation, but as a parallel space of invention and thought — a form of partnership with the sculpture itself. The line speaks through absence as much as presence. It evokes the forms that remain in memory, in books, in landscapes, and in images after they have disappeared. In this way, the line becomes both trace and anticipation: an attestation to the desire of thinking itself.
Instagram: @labauviesculpture