PIASA is pleased to kick off 2023, and indeed its design season, with a prestige sale dedicated to Mithé Espelt at the Patinoire Royale de Bruxelles - Galerie Valérie Bach.
This sale focuses on an artist who has long remained in the shadows and whose work has been widely recognized by gallery owner and collector Antoine Candau. After starting out in Paris alongside Line Vautrin, Mithé Espelt decided to return to Lunel, her home town, where she set up her ceramics workshop. From there, she multiplied her collaborations (Maison Souleiado, Poupette Vachon...) by mastering the art of earth and fire like no other, all without signing her creations. After many discussions with PIASA, Candau agreed to present a set of objects (lamps, jewels and especially mirrors) that he has collected over the last twenty years.
Mithé Espelt (1923-2020)
Set of ten mirrors
Estimate: 18000 / 25000 €
"The decision to unveil a collection is never easy. The decision to share it is even less so. But the proposal made by Frédéric Chambre to present the works of Mithé Espelt in the prestigious setting of the Patinoire Royale in Brussels proved irresistible. I would like the selection we made together from among the most beautiful pieces of my collection to be a form of homage to the multiple facets of the talent of this phenomenal artist whose work arouses so much interest today.
The bewitchment provoked among amateurs of the work of Lunel's alchemist - who claimed to know how to transform earth into gold - should not obscure the deep concerns of an artist who never signed her work for fear of being dragged into personality quarrels where so many artists of the time lost their souls. A true suffragette of ceramics, she preferred, in the secrecy of the boudoir, to evoke the trappings of seduction in order to better speak to her contemporaries about the immense freedom that was there, within reach.
Mithé Espelt (1923-2020)
'Anahuac' mirror
Estimate: 15000 / 20000 €
The success of the workshop she set up in 1946 in the south of France, after having worked for two years in Paris for Line Vautrin, was immediate. Mithé found herself in charge of the jewelry collections of the Souleiado House and made special orders for clients including Louise de Vilmorin and Poupette Vachon, Brigitte Bardot's stylist in Saint-Tropez. We will always have a special affection for the pieces from this period, light and fragile witnesses of a vocabulary in full development.
Throughout a long career enamelled with the gold of success and extraordinary encounters, this explorer of reflections and traps of seduction has created an inimitable style, one of a free and avant-garde work made in grace and lightness.
Mithé Espelt passed in September 2020, just as the monograph "Mithé Espelt, le luxe discret du quotidien" was being published, on which we had worked together with much pleasure - thus succeeding in avoiding glory until the end - she who had no other claim than to be a humble craftsman. For the hands of the potter return to the earth when the works they have created bear witness forever to their enchanting gestures."
- Antoine Candau, October 2022
