Claudine Loquen is a painter, sculptor, and illustrator. Her entire body of work belongs to the movements of singular art, outsider art, and naïve art. She lives and works between Paris and Fécamp.  

Some of her works are included in the collections of French and international museums.

 

Youth and education

Claudine Loquen was born (along with her twin sister) on February 22, 1965, in Sainte-Adresse near Le Havre. Her ancestors, originally from Dinan and Ploubalay in the Côtes-d'Armor region, as well as from Rouen, Yvetot, and Veauville-lès-Baons (Pays de Caux) in Normandy, were weavers, embroiderers, and tailors. Her father joined the French Navy after training at the École des mousses in Loctudy. Her mother, Nicole Tesnière, worked for the SNCF at Le Havre train station. She passed on to her daughters her passion for poetry and literature.

 

Following her parents’ professional relocations, her childhood was spent in Le Havre, Petite-Rosselle, Chalon-sur-Saône, and then Veauville-lès-Baons near Yvetot. As a teenager, she attended the School of Fine Arts in Le Havre. In 1979, she began studying visual arts at Claude-Monet High School in Le Havre and later at Jeanne-d’Arc High School in Rouen, where she obtained her baccalaureate in 1982. After studying literature at the University of Rouen Normandy, she held various jobs.

 

During her early childhood, she and her twin sister experienced the trauma of sexual predation, which she buried for around thirty years, but which, despite later revelation, fueled a chronic depression that her artistic life helped her cope with.

 

Artistic career

From 1988 onward, Loquen lived in Paris and later established her first studio in Maisons-Laffitte, where she resided from 1994 to 2011. Her first solo exhibition took place in 2003 at the literary café Les Deux Magots in Paris. Exhibitions then followed one another in France and abroad, in museums, galleries, singular art and naïve art festivals, and Parisian salons such as Figuration Critique and the Biennale 109.

 

The artist is a member of the Salon d’Automne in Paris, where she belonged to the “Myths and Realities” section, then “Myths and Singularity,” from 2010 to 2020. During that same salon, on December 8, 2014, Colombe Anouilh awarded her the Jean-Anouilh Prize for her canvas work Young Girls with Wolves.

 

From 2018 to 2023, her work was permanently represented at Galerie Rollin in Rouen.

 

In 2020, she published The Forgotten Women through La Grisette Editions, a publishing structure she founded, a book highlighting women left in the shadows by History.

 

In 2021, Claudine Loquen created and chaired the Naïve Art section at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, bringing together around thirty artists from the naïve art movement each year. She also plays an active role in structuring and defending this movement.

 

Her work appears in numerous public collections — museums, universities, cities — confirming her recognized place in the contemporary artistic landscape.

 

Between gentleness and menace, a body of work exploring human ambivalence

 

Throughout her exhibitions, the artist has developed an immediately recognizable universe: pale faces, solemn gazes, female silhouettes seemingly floating in a suspended space. From the outset, her works explore a form of inner fragility, not as a biographical confession, but as an aesthetic signature. The themes she chooses — sisterhood, forgotten figures, metamorphoses, animal presence — reveal a sensitivity focused on the shadowy and luminous areas of human existence. Several exhibitions testify to this, such as Once Upon a Time at the University of Rouen (2024), centered on fairy tales and their ambiguities, or Sisters and Stories (2023), which explores the links between women, memory, and transmission.

 

Among Loquen’s recurring motifs, the wolf occupies a singular place — an ambivalent creature, at once guide, threat, double, or protector. This theme runs through several exhibitions and conferences, notably Wolf, Where Are You Going? (University of Rouen, 2016) or her talks during Springtime of the Naïves (2025), where she explicitly addresses lupine symbolism. In her work, the wolf does not merely represent the wild animal, but the inner tension between vulnerability and strength, instinct and restraint. This same thread appears in her illustrations — from the tale Bang! It’s You, the Wolf! (2018) to her poetic albums prefaced by authors such as JM. Le Goff and FA. Oudin.

 

Women — sisters, heroines, anonymous figures, forgotten women — are at the center of her approach. The artist devoted several solo exhibitions to them, such as Around Blanche (2024) and The Ladies of Les Andelys (2019). She also leads guided tours and lectures on sisterhood, poetry, and naïve art, confirming her interest in collective narratives and marginalized voices. This attention to discreet or marginalized figures metaphorically echoes the inner tensions experienced by her characters: as though they carried within themselves a dense, inhabited silence.

 

Thus, Claudine Loquen’s art does not speak of depression or predation in a biographical sense, but rather explores with subtlety the zones of vulnerability and tension that run through myths, femininity, animality, and identity. In her paintings, beings seem to navigate at the edge of themselves: a territory where one encounters as much gentleness as unease, as much affection as ambivalence — a place where one understands that, sometimes, fairy tales tell the truth better than reality.