Hugo Baud: Face To Face

Hugo Baud: Face To Face

“Who am I behind the mask? Who am I within the crowd?” – these are the questions that keep contemporary artist Hugo Baud up at night as he works on his latest series of paintings.

Hugo Baud is a visual artist born in Montpellier, in the south of France and currently established in Berlin, Germany. With a background steeped in skateboarding, and street culture, Baud frequently references counterculture and social iconography through his ambiguous figures. Creating his own aesthetic fantasy, he hopes to confront his viewers with the state of their own individuality and how they relate to those around them. Grimacing faces, cunning grins, sexual symbology all work together to paint the narratives each of his subjects find themselves in. Each one, a different attempt to question “How did we get here?” and “Where do we go from here?”.

Originally studying comics and illustrations, storytelling has always been an aspect Baud excelled in as he began to foray from the contained spaces of comic strips to the sprawling white surfaces of canvases. A journey that allowed him the room to develop his signature style that references the likes of Kenny Scarf and Keith Harring – using shape, color, and simplified figures to establish a dialogue between the work and the viewer – with a certain vagueness that allows for open interpretation regarding the subject’s identity our ability to place ourselves in the scene. Baud’s work places us face to face with our greatest collective insecurity – How do we fit in? 

In his newest series of paintings, Baud starts to remove the mask to unveil more honest identities underneath. Establishing a chance for us to reconcile how and where we fit into a particular social order or hierarchy, and a reckoning with our inner selves and the psychology that drives who we are and what we stand for. 

Coming exclusively to Guy Hepner Editions, we’re pleased to present Hugo Baud: Face To Face – 19 exclusive original paintings that will be available to the public Thursday Oct. 6th at 11am EST. For more information on availability, please contact info@guyhepner.comcreate new email