VAL

Val, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine. Her parents were Nathalie Goutard and Jean-Claude Goutard, an engineer working for a large oil company. Because of her father’s position, she shared her childhood between Europe, Africa and South America. After studying literature and advertising, she worked in marketing until 2001. In 2002 a friend, Florence Jouglard, an auctioneer by training and also an artist, enticed her to try to sculpt from clay.

Working on clay with her own hands, Val felt a revelation, a kind of “love at first sight” for this activity which she perceived as an extension of her inner world. “It was like a revelation, a sort of resurgence of a long-buried memory. My love for sculpture, the material and the volume was born in a completely immediate fashion”, she said during an interview in 2014. During two years, Val took art lessons in Paris and then, in August 2004, went to settle in Thailand, where she gave up clay for working with bronze. Working with this material, Goutard, who took the artist’s name of VAL, and emphasized her self-learning. Her relative lack of culture in visual arts brought her, she said, “a freedom vis-à-vis the masters”, a larger freedom of creation.
In 2007, she met in Bangkok Frédéric Morel, who she in married in 2009. He gave up his work in business to promote VAL’s work on the art market and establish her reputation at an international level.

Through multiple international solo-exhibitions and public installations, VAL became an artist recognized in Asia and Europe. At the end of 2015, she received the Trophée des Français de l’étranger from the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius.
Shortly before the opening of an exhibition of a new series of art works at the RedSea Gallery in Singapore, VAL died in a motorbike accident in October 2016 in the Thai province of Chonburi. After her funeral in a Buddhist temple in Bangkok and at the Catholic church of Missions Etrangères de Paris, also in Bangkok, her ashes were spread on the site of Ocean Utopia, one of her major art works, near Ko Tao.