Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Marc Bourlier spent his youth on his way between Africa, South America and Asia. Marc Burlier became a painter and admired the works of Calder, Miró, Braque and Leger. After a stage in Brussels in 1986, he began a period of almost 10 years working exclusively with corrugated board. As he said of himself, he was dissatisfied with his painting, when one day in 1995 atz the beach of Normandy he came accross a small piece of driftwood from which he made his first work. He had found his new form of expression. It meant the transition from color to non-color and from painting to relief and sculpture as well. In his work man is in the center of attention, but not the individual, but the community.

The work of Marc Bourlier is influenced by his childhood in Africa. His works always show groups that represent the coexistence deeply rooted in African society. Important is the collective, the community in a hard life full of secrets. The texture and the use of finely balanced and richly nuanced color gradations of washed-out wood, which are marked by the ravages of time, give the work something archaic and timeless with an ethnological touch. The sum of the strung heads can also be regarded as a "memento mori", as a symbol for the following generations, which as a whole outlive the time, within which, however, the individual and the individual is not importantt.