THE CREATOR
Since her first collection in 1998, Vanessa Mitrani has been a unique figure in the creation world. An expert of glass, she works it under many forms, she claims her designer status by signing consistent collections where each piece is unique as resulting from an unpredictable process.
Her passion for glass goes back to her studies at the Paris Decorative Arts university. Her work was built on experiment, proof of her singularity in a time where crafts and design seldom met. Vanessa Mitrani explores glass work during sometimes unexpected experiments.She blows glass in contact with leather, porcelain, marble and fabric. Among herexperiments, her creations of restrained glass with metal meet with true success.She elaborates many of her collections around this technique, which has become one her signatures. He artistic projects are not only aesthetically beautiful, they also carry existentialist reflections feeding her productions.
In 2002, to cope with the extension of her production and to find partners who are up to her high standards, Vanessa Mitrani decides to become her own design editor. As such, she manages the design, production and distribution of her creations herself from her workshop/showroom in Pantin. She collaborates with several home furnishing and decoration brands such as Ligne Roset, Habitat,Salviati, Truffaut, or Roche Bobois with which she presents a new collection every year.
From 2008, her creative approach takes on new forms. For instance, Vanessa Mitrani finds inspiration in Japanese porcelain and its inhabited ponds, for the NoLimit collection. In 2011, she presents the DarkCollection, a very personal series of vases and lamps that question the beliefs and evocations of the different stages of life and death around the world –a world tour of the symbolic power of objects of worship and magic, some of which she gleaned along her many trips.
In 2013, Vanessa Mitrani celebrates her fifteen years of creation in a retrospective of more than 300 pieces at the Slott Lab in Paris: the chance to sneak into the backstage of her creation process through trials and experiments. Without any chronological classification and within a stripped down scenography, most pieces, shown here forthe very first time, are sorted by research typology, in order to identify many families.This event is also the opportunity for her to renew with restrained glass, by giving new finishing touches to past projects.
The same year, she also collaborates with the Australian artist Diana Brennan, specialized in metal mesh work, for a shared exhibit, “Needle Work”. Both designers work in Pantin in neighbouring workshops. They present their four--‐hand creations, inspired by the work of menders, who used to repair earthenware and porcelain until the early 20th century. Their complementarity also brought them to initiate a dialog between glass and metal mesh out of any exhibit or order context.
Vanessa Mitrani’s know--‐how, technical mastery and artistic sense open the doorsof the Museum of Decorative Arts to her in 2015, with eight of her emblematic pieces joining the permanent collections.
In April, she presents her very first tableware collection, Gravity, as part of an exhibit organized by Wallpaper magazine in Milan. She combines blown glass and polished bronze to create four models of glasses with an original concept – the idea being to place the glass on a base that wears its imprint. Today she’s editing this collection, available on the website
Every year Vanessa Mitrani presents her new collections at the Maison & Objet show in Paris, proving how glass remains a living, inventive and inspiring material.