Hugo De Clerck was a modernist painter and draughtsman. In 1959 he settled in Deurle and later moved to Heusden and Hansbeke.
At the beginning of his career he painted figuratively and intimately, after 1958 he switched to non-figurative work, on the border of figuration and abstraction. Work by Hugo Declercq can be found in the Print Cabinets in Brussels and Paris and in the Museums of Brussels, Deinze, Ghent and Ostend.