SEB BOUCHARD

Sébastien Bouchard (born 1971, France) is a painter and muralist whose practice explores singularity, otherness, and hybrid identities through portraiture and visual constructions. His artistic gaze was shaped from an early age through numerous journeys between France and Senegal, a country he first discovered at the age of ten. These repeated stays in West Africa, between the ages of 10 and 30, deeply nourished his artistic sensibility. Accompanying his father to artists’ studios in Dakar, he had a formative encounter with drawing, color, and visual expression, and very early on decided that art would be his vocation.

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Back in France, Sébastien Bouchard pursued formal art studies and graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire in 1996. The years that followed were marked by an intense period of creative exploration: music production, graphic design, and fashion all contributed to shaping his sensibility and expanding his visual language.

In the early 2000s, he returned to Africa—first to Conakry, Guinea, then to Senegal from 2005 onward—where he established his studio in the Siné Saloum region. There, he regularly presented his work in major cultural events such as the OFF Biennale of Dakar, as well as in cultural institutions across West Africa, including in Mali, Mauritania, and The Gambia.

From 2010 onward, he has divided his time between France and Senegal, collaborating with artist collectives and galleries in West Africa and Europe. Alongside his studio practice, Sébastien Bouchard has developed a strong public art practice, creating large-scale murals in the United States, Europe, and Africa. His work asserts a vibrant aesthetic that inhabits urban space as much as it does the gallery.

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At the heart of his work, portraiture becomes a means of questioning the complexity of identity, exploring cultural encounters, and celebrating hybridity. By layering elements drawn from different eras, traditions, and imaginaries, he creates figures that appear both familiar and singular—faces that embody plurality, in-betweenness, and the richness of cultural mixing.

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Sébastien Bouchard seeks to merge popular art and fine art, developing a visual language rooted both in collective memory and in an open, contemporary modernity. His work can be read as a cartography of inner worlds, where painting translates fractures, encounters, and the ongoing recomposition of the contemporary subject.