About
Marie De Decker is a renowned artist born in Montmartre, living and working between Luxembourg, Paris and Mauritius. Her artistic practice blends tradition with innovation, transforming the ancient craft of gilding through exclusive techniques she has developed over years of research and practice. Each artwork is meticulously handcrafted using pure materials, with no varnish or synthetic finish — allowing light and matter to fully interact.
Inspired by contemplative walks through the mangroves of the Indian Ocean, her luminous motifs celebrate nature, spirituality, and eternity. Her creations resonate with a prestigious international audience, including cultural institutions, royal families, and heads of state — offering an intimate encounter with time, space, and the sacred.
Origin of the
Inspiration
Marie’s artistic vision is rooted in her daily life in Poudre d’Or, a coastal village in Mauritius surrounded by preserved mangrove forests. These ecosystems, rich in biodiversity and essential for carbon capture, offer her a direct connection to the power and permanence of nature. Her practice emerged from a fascination with gold as a material born from the stars — one that has existed since the formation of Earth and will outlive humanity.
She began by applying gold onto images, seeking to restore meaning to photography. Over time, this gesture evolved into sculptural work, expanding into space. Her creations now reflect the enduring presence of natural elements — birds, fish, landscapes — carried by gold and transformed into messages for the future. This commitment to sustainability is also technical: she works with oyster and scallop shells, without solvents or toxic materials, out of responsibility to her craft and to life itself.
Through her works, Marie shares a lived experience of nature’s force, beauty, and resilience — offering viewers not just a vision, but a trace of the eternal.
Diversity of Her
Artworks
Working with 27 shades of gold, Marie De Decker creates multidimensional pieces where gold, deliberately left unvarnished, interacts naturally with organic materials like wood and mother-of-pearl. Her artworks—ranging from intricately crafted boxes and suspended volumes to gold-accentuated photographic prints—immerse viewers in an interplay of light, shadow, and texture, celebrating gold’s inherent plasticity and profound luminosity.
What is her
Background
Marie has a distinguished academic background. She holds a French baccalaureate with honors in Applied Arts, specializing in theatre (Lycée Ernest Hemingway, Nîmes, 2006), and continued her studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, the Agnès Varda School of Photography, the Roger Lambion Institute (in heritage guiding and Belgian history), and the Francisco Ferrer School of Graphic Design.
After an initial series of photographic exhibitions, she dedicated her career to mastering the art of portraiture through her photography studio in Luxembourg. Driven by a search for meaning and permanence, Marie later trained in gilding in Alsace, in order to enrich her portraits with this timeless metal.
Through research, experimentation, and an unwavering artistic vision, she reimagined this ancestral craft, giving it a new purpose: to tell what must endure.