While living under the golds of the French Republic - Marie-Laure is the former wife of French politician Dominique de Villepin - she soon found an escape from official protocol in the manual trades of restoration. For 12 years, she trained as a gilder in a Paris workshop, learning to master the complex techniques of this age-old craft. In 2006, she received the C.A.P. qualification in gilding, while assuming her role as Prime Minister's wife.

On the occasion of her first solo exhibition in Aix-en-Provence in 2007, Marie-Laure adopts her pseudonym, a bold reminder of ‘La vie est belle’, life is beautiful. She makes her mark by devoting her first work as a visual artist to nature's most insolently feminine form. Triumphant motherhood or incredible sensuality? The coco de mer is the largest seed in the plant world, the fruit of a coconut palm endemic to the Seychelles archipelago. Marie-Laure takes it into the world of the sacred, covering it in gold leaf using the traditional technique of distemper gilding. She remodels its forms, invests herself in bronze, then collaborates with a master glassmaker in Murano to explore all the strengths and fragilities of these SEEDS OF LIFE. Since 2010, she has been exhibiting in galleries and museums, as well as on the sidelines of COP 21. “My leap into the light”, as she says at the time, with apprehension.

In 2024, Marie-Laure Viébel invests herself in another treasure of nature at the antipodes: archaic, fragile, a witness to man's first symbolic capacities. The bone - in this case the “wish bone” of the Sunday chicken carcass - becomes a monumental arch during the Olympic summer in Paris. FRONT AGAINST FRONT, TOGETHER to nourish visitors' reflections, to make a wish and enrich their stroll through the city of light.

Marie-Laure Viébel is a visual artist who celebrates the beauty of nature, sublimating both its triumph and its apparent insignificance.