Marie-Madeleine Gautier is a French sculptor who creates big-bottomed bronze women with massive thighs - the sort of smoothly chunky presences that you find yourself surreptitiously stroking as you wander around her exhibition. These faceless females have never counted a calorie in their lives, which is not to say that they are indolent creatures. They dance, they read (evidently not diet books), they embrace, they balance themselves happily against mirrors. And they make the observer smile.
Gautier was in Hong Kong last week for the opening of her show. Getting to the bottom of her artistic spirit required more effort than her buns-of-bronze motif might lead one to expect; she speaks little English and her interpreter was expecting a Chinese writer. Nonetheless, she is a memorable presence in her own right. With her diamond nose-stud, turquoise and aubergine hair tied up in a topknot, pale blue glasses and long plum robe, she attracted the attention of passers-by who peered, baffled by such a vision, through the gallery windows. 'It is successful, the hair?' asked Gautier, patting it with a charming smile. Then she requested a Diet Coke.
She has been sculpting her big women for 20 years, almost half her life (she is 43). After graduating from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she worked with big paper and steel sculptures, dipped in plaster, in a series collectively entitled I Am Present. One day, she realised that collection had suddenly become her past, and she immediately began to work on bronze and resin sculptures. The early versions were small and when she enlarged them, the top halves remained tiny but the lower halves grew enormous.
'This is my philosophy of life today,' says Gautier. 'It's about disproportion. For me, it's important to make harmony out of disproportion. People always think fat is ugly, but why? Why is it ugly? I want to make it look perfect.' Although she creates men occasionally, she mainly does women because in the world of art, in general, she says, the depiction of women is more popular than that of men. Also, as a child in Normandy, she grew up with her parents, her grandmother, her great-aunt and her two sisters in a predominantly female household. Now she has two children of her own - a 19-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy - but she continues to cast women.
One of her works was inspired by a trip to Nanjing last year and consists of a fan-holding girl whose broad dimensions will not be familiar to those who have travelled much in China; her Balinese dancers, too, are considerably more generous of hip than is usually the case on that island. Gautier may start in the spirit of scrupulous observation but what emerges is unique to her particular imagination.
The most obvious question, of course, is - do these wonderfully tactile broads (literally) make her laugh, too? The good-humoured Gautier considers this aspect of her work for a while. 'No,' she says finally. 'When I am making the sculpture, I find it funny sometimes. But the finished piece does not make me laugh. It's not logical but that is how it is.' There are a few animals amid the Hong Kong exhibition, for Gautier sometimes likes to create such domestic creatures as cats and rabbits. She has also executed a sculpture of the animal kingdom's equivalent of her large ladies. It is, unfortunately, not in Hong Kong but you will not be surprised to learn it is a hippopotamus.