Biographie
She grew up near Dijon. “In the village of Saint-Julien,” says Marianne Guedin. Her father: a country doctor, old-fashioned general medicine. Human above all. Particular signs of the parents: the father performs magic tricks. The mother cultivates the family garden with fantasy. At 16, Marianne Guedin wants to “be an artist in Paris”. She has just returned from a trip with her father to see an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. It was the end of the 1980s. Her dream: “Doing Decorative Arts” But in her baccalaureate year, she takes French leave with a fellow acrobat. Direction: the capital and a bohemian life in the school of Annie Fratellini.
After a year of prep-school at the Atelier de Sèvres, Marianne, the student, joined the National School of Decorative Arts (Ensad). “This school has changed my life”. For five years, she discovered architecture, scenography, furniture and design. At the same time, she is a “flower vendor in Montmartre”. The year she graduated, she pushed open the door to Christian Tortu’s flower boutique-workshop. Without an appointment. She came for an internship, and worked there for three years.
In 2005, she created her object creation brand: Dingue de Guedin. She is inspired by glass as a raw material and the idea of making vases. She gives carte-blanche to her designer friends: Soline d´Aboville, Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, Guillaume Bardet and Jean-Marc Gady. She entrusts the manufacturing to to glassblowers, whose artisanal know-how makes it possible to concretize as accurately, and closely as possible, each sketch. Because Marianne Guedin loves this four-handed work, the exchanges of views and points of view. Her vases stand out and set her apart: in 2006, she was elected “Designer of the year – Now! Design à vivre” at Maison & Objet.
In 2012, she reveals yet another facet of her work: monumental scenographies. Life-size living and ephemeral paintings that make people talk. Word of mouth is immediate. Luxury houses, event agencies, fashion figures … all ask for her. In France and across borders. The elegance of her staged flowers adorn both haute couture fashion shows and evenings at the Cannes Film Festival. Her audacity. Like an alchemist, she combines, mixes, focused on the exceptional, she goes off the beaten path, favoring local production. She doesn’t hold herself back from anything. Starting with the “weeds”, as she says. Because the brambles, clematis and other mosses of undergrowth are always part of her creations. Spontaneity guides her. She auscultates the stems, takes care of the flowers, listens to nature, excels in “haute bouture”.
Marianne Guedin has the class of the unclassifiable. She flies from project to project pollinating her creative universe. Her liveliness, her responsiveness, her attraction to all things curious, the unusual, the original, position her where few venture. She stays far from codes, and is always on the fringes of fads, never in the copy and paste. Her singular career and her experience have elevated her to the rank of artist. Heir to a know-how acquired in Arts-Déco, her creations embody a French art de vivre. They also testify to a freshness of spirit allied to the rigor of the execution. The gesture is custom and one of a kind.
Written by Anne Eveillard