b. 1996
Birmingham, United Kingdom
Based in London
Email: gougeon.augustin@gmail.com
Instagram: @augustin_gougeon
Statement
My recent paintings imagine small, self-contained worlds where figures operate within their surroundings through simple, almost ritual actions. These scenes hover between what came before and what might remain.
Their high-key, synthetic colour, from citrus yellows and chemical greens to electric pinks, developed out of earlier work where I used flat grids, bright blocks and artificial palettes to reduce images to their basic structures. Those early paintings worked almost like diagrams, schematic spaces without narrative, representing a world distilled to essentials.
The current work grows directly from that language. The game-board quality of the grids becomes the stage on which the new figures move, and the digital, plastic colours shift from background experiment to atmosphere. What was once abstract becomes a setting, a nascent terrain built for a single gesture or moment of attention.
I am interested in how humans first grasped the material world: the beginnings of tools, craft, navigation and wonder. These origins are not reconstructed histories but moments held at the threshold of meaning, where a gesture meets matter and a sense of the world begins to form.
Selected Exhibitions
2025 — West London Free School Alumni Exhibition 2025: Championing Creativity, Riverside Studios, London, UK
2025 — BODYSPACES 2025, ELEMENTS Contemporary Art Space, London, UK
2020 — Prix Hélène Linossier, Lyon, France
2020 — MFA Degree Show, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France
2019 — Lézard Demain, Atelier Zaï, Lyon, France
2018 — DNA Degree Show, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France
Education
2020
Master of Fine Arts, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux‑Arts de Lyon, France
2018
Bachelor of Fine Arts, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux‑Arts de Lyon, France
2015
Foundation at École des Beaux‑Arts du Genevois, Annemasse, France