Visual Artist

Karl-Hugo Mars

Karl-Hugo Mars creates sculptures, paintings, furniture and light installations from industrial metal, which he transforms, assembles and reworks with rare sensitivity. For over 25 years, he has been shaping the material with passion and rigour, adopting an approach based on reappropriation and metamorphosis: giving new life to the most diverse and unexpected objects by repurposing them, creating harmony, breathing lightness into dense material, creating a unique atmosphere with shapes and light, playing with symbols… these are just some of the avenues he explores with consistency and poetry.

Far from standardised production, each piece designed by Karl-Hugo Mars is unique, the antithesis of the industrial logic that produced the elements he uses. This contrast is at the heart of his approach: where series production imposes uniformity, he favours the unexpected, the accidental, the trace of the gesture.

In his furniture designs, he takes this artisanal approach even further, creating true works of ‘metal marquetry’. Like a goldsmith or metal cabinetmaker, he assembles fragments of sheet metal, wire mesh, machined or oxidised plates with meticulous precision. The surfaces thus become mosaics of steel, copper or aluminium, revealing textures, reflections, contrasts and plays of light. Each piece tells a story, combining raw materials with unexpected refinement.