SAINT-LOUIS-LÈS-BITCHE .- Since 2014, the Foundation has staged a series of exhibitions at La Grande Place, at the heart of the Saint-Louis crystal foundry, showcasing new work in the contemporary arts through the prism of artisan skills and expertise. Each exhibition is developed in partnership with a local cultural institution and the Cristallerie Saint Louis. To date, four seasons have been produced with, respectively, the Centre Pompidou Metz, 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine (Metz), the Centre d’Art Contemporain – La Synagogue de Delme, and the Centre d’Art Vents des Forêts. The new season will be curated by the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (MAMCS), through to 2027. MAMCS will highlight creative practitioners rooted in the region’s fertile local artistic terrain, beginning with Gretel Weyer, from May 23 to September 28, 2025.
For Gretel Weyer, working in the unique context of La Grande Place is both a challenge and an immediate source of inspiration. A ceramicist by training, she feels a close connection to the site, which is not only an exhibition space but also a centre for artisan production. Fire, an essential element in the crystal-making process, plays the same role in ceramics – a force to be harnessed, transforming the raw clay with which Weyer works. Ultimately, the shape and size of the glass display cases reserved for guest artists at the site suggested miniature, model theatres, upon whose stages stories of everyday life are played out.
Against this background, Weyer devised “Les invités”, an exhibition conceived as an unfolding series of stories, freed from the confines of conventional narrative structure, where everyday life and fantasy meet. Like invited guests, we observe domestic dioramas in which objects come to life or metamorphose. Forest creatures appear in private, indoor settings, and we sense a kind of magic at work in the home.
We are reminded of fairy tales, without ever quite being able to pinpoint where it was that we first encountered these serpents spilling from inside a vase, or the chair covered in fur. We search in vain: the stories that Gretel Weyer presents are not popular folktales. Rather, they trace the contours of a world at once intimate, secret, and open to all our dreams.
GRETEL WEYER
Gretel Weyer (b. Saverne, Alsace, 1984) lives and works in Strasbourg. Her sculptural work transforms simple, everyday objects into fantastical pieces that spark our imagination. Her work may be seen as a joyful celebration of childhood and innocence, set in a fairy-tale atmosphere, against a natural backdrop that shifts from primal forests to enchanted gardens. Her familiar, everyday iconography draws on popular culture, folk imagery, and literary social realism à la Mark Twain. Gretel Weyer’s work is a hybrid mix of literature, figurative painterly techniques, and the vocabulary and syntax of cinema.
Beyond the canon of folk imagery, these are snapshots of childhood, turned on their head to cast complex notions of innocence and integrity in a new, more realist light.
