Since graduating from the École national supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris in 1987 Frédérique Lucien has exhibited regularly in France and abroad, and her works are part of several public collections, including the Fonds national d’art contemporain. Introduced to observing nature by her father, she studies the vegetal, mineral, and more recently, organic and anatomical world. Oscillating between abstraction and realism, her work combines a formal precision and symbolic dimension, situating the artist in an original and pioneering position in the field of art. From diverse mediums (gouache, pastel, charcoal) on supports of various types and formats (canvas and paper fragments, silkscreen on glass), she questions lines, contours, curves, the opposition between presence and absence, opaqueness and transparency, and relationships of scale. Like an entomologist, F. Lucien works in series, pushing the investigation of single forms, as in the series Follicules (1994) with variations of oblong drawings in ochre on two different kinds of paper; then working on increasingly larger scales, notably with her black Formes (1995) consisting of vast surfaces of acrylic on paper mounted on wood, and Giornate (2003, 2005), her immense compositions of painted pieces of fabric fragmented and rearranged on the walls.

In smaller formats, based on the idea of superposing a number of different colours and papers, she realised the series Îles (2000). Since 2006 she has shown interest in the human figure, notably with Anonymes, a series she has been developing since 2010. In parallel to her practice, since 1985 she has carried out diverse publishing activities: book illustration, linocuts, silk screens and lithographs printed on paper, caulking paper, Priplak sheets and aluminium.