Exhibition – 15 years of Lalique Art
The Lalique Museum is located in Alsace, in the same village as the factory – the brand’s sole crystal production site. Every year, its summer exhibition focuses on a new theme to complement the chronological presentation in the permanent exhibitions (ranging from Art Nouveau jewellery and Art Deco glass and perfume bottles to contemporary crystal).
To celebrate fifteen years of Lalique Art, the Crystallisation exhibition offers a retrospective of these exceptional collaborations, revealing the works and the story of their origin. It also explores the artists’ personal worlds and careers, highlighting the close and fertile dialogue with Maison Lalique’s artisans – often faced with major technical challenges – and shows how these two worlds resonate and respond to each other, how mutually nourishing and enriching they prove to be.
An avant-garde jeweller who became a master of Art Deco glass, René Lalique was quick to see glass’s marvellous potential. Its fusibility, malleability and remarkable resistance when solidified in sufficient mass; its ability to be moulded, engraved, coloured, iridescent, opaque or translucent, rough, matt or polished; the magical effects that can be achieved through the play of reflections and transparency; its unique characteristics making it, in the hands of those talented enough to use it, both the most delicate of precious materials and the most flexible. All this makes glass an incomparable medium in the hands of the ingenious artist, providing his imagination and talent with an almost limitless field of activity and discovery.
While René Lalique advocated the democratisation of art through the tableware and home decor items he produced and sold in his catalogue, he also created works of art, using the lost wax technique to produce these unique pieces and small series. These prestigious, fascinating and rare works are now particularly in demand.
In keeping with the spirit of René Lalique himself, Lalique Art has revived this sophisticated technique, while also using glassblowing and moulding to produce exceptional pieces. By putting its expertise at the service of the great names in modern and contemporary art, Lalique Art is continuing René Lalique’s visionary legacy. Each collaboration becomes an opportunity for dialogue between a material with infinite possibilities and the unique universes of renowned artists, where glass becomes, in turn, sculpture, light, a sensitive surface or intimate architecture. By asserting its role as both a publisher and a conveyer of contemporary art, Lalique Art contributes to the sustainability of glassmaking expertise and its renewal, through works that combine technical excellence with artistic ambition.
List of artists / foundations / successors with whom Lalique Art has collaborated and who are featured in the exhibition:
Yves Klein
Rembrandt Bugatti
Damien Hirst
Mario Botta
Zaha Hadid
Terry Rodgers
Elizabeth de Portzamparc
Nic Fiddian-Green
James Turrell
René Magritte
Rudy Ricciotti
Fang Lijun
Exhibition from 12 June to 1 November
The museum is open daily from 9.30 am to 6.30 pm until 30 September, and then from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm.
Admission is included in the museum entry fee. €9.50 per person (full price)