Val (sculptor)
Valérie Goutard, known as VAL, was a French sculptor born on 20 May 1967 in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris. Her upbringing happened across Europe, Africa, and South America because her father, an engineer, moved the family for work. After studying literature and advertising, she worked in marketing until 2001. A friend, Florence Jouglard, encouraged her to try sculpting with clay in 2002, and Val felt an immediate, life‑changing connection with sculpture.
Val took art lessons in Paris for two years and moved to Thailand in August 2004, where she began working with bronze. She chose the artist name VAL and taught herself as she went, believing the lack of formal background gave her a sense of freedom. One of her early pieces, Miss Trendy (2004), showed a graceful, strong female figure. VAL’s work often explored how people relate to their surroundings, using space, benches, stairs, and other elements to express balance, movement, and hope.
In 2008 the Wellington Gallery in Hong Kong showed her works, marking her first major international attention. After marrying Frédéric Morel in 2009, she set up a Bangkok workshop with Thai artisans. Bronze pieces were cast at the Ayutthaya foundry, and welding and finishing happened in Bangkok. Her career blossomed with exhibitions in Shanghai, Taipei, Singapore, and other cities, with galleries like Philippe Staib and RedSea playing important roles.
In 2010 VAL created Urban Life, a five-meter sculpture for the Jing’An International Sculpture Project in Shanghai. It featured tall, slender figures in twisted frames, conveying deep thought, movement, and social interaction. This was her first large‑scale work and a sign of the monumental direction her art would take. She continued to push the size and ambition of her sculptures, producing a 2.25-meter piece called Inle Balance III in 2012, inspired by Burmese fishermen and showing an apparently delicate balance between weight and motion.
VAL’s public installations grew internationally, and in March 2016 Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) organized a major exhibition of her work, Anatomy of a Creative Path, with support from the Philippe Staib Gallery. CAFA later added two of her works, Eternal Pillars and Autoportrait, to its permanent collection. Critics and friends remember her as humble, generous, and deeply engaged with her audience, always seeking emotional connection through her sculptures.
Around this time VAL began exploring new materials and projects. She worked with Murano glass in Italy, collaborating with master glassblowers to combine glass with bronze and explore light, shade, and reflection in a new way. She also pursued ecology-inspired art, planning an underwater installation off Ko Tao in southern Thailand. Working with the New Heaven Conservation Program, she placed three large bronze figures on the seabed so that broken corals could re-grow around them, a project that required careful logistics to withstand underwater currents.
VAL’s ultimate monumental project was Du chaos à la sagesse (From Chaos to Wisdom): a 36-meter-long sculpture, 4.5 meters high, created for a Taiwanese collector and installed in Taichung in 2017 after her death. Another notable piece, Ville fantastique II, was donated to the city of Bangkok in 2015 and officially unveiled in 2017.
Valérie Goutard died in a motorcycle accident on 27 October 2016 in Chonburi, Thailand, while preparing an exhibition of her bronze and glass works. Her funeral was held in Bangkok, and her ashes were scattered at Ocean Utopia, one of her major works near Ko Tao. In late 2016 her posthumous exhibition in Singapore opened, titled The Tenth Eonian Initiative—an homage to her Venetian-inspired approach.
Val left a lasting impression as an artist who sought moments of feeling and balance in human form. She believed sculpture should evoke emotion and invite dialogue with the viewer, not just present certainty. Her work bridged cultures and materials, from bronze to glass, and from urban public pieces to underwater installations, always guided by a strong sense of humanity and curiosity.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 20:59 (CET).