Antoine Leperlier Shaping Time. Works in Glass from 1981 to Now

The works of Antoine Leperlier are made of a material that eternalises a moment while simultaneously revealing its transience: glass. Now spanning more than four decades, the artistic oeuvre of one of the most significant French glass artists of our time is presented in this new, richly illustrated monograph: an artistic enquiry of passing and remembrance, past and future.

Antoine Leperlier (b. 1953) trained as a painter, but since the 1980s he has been working as an independent artist in the medium of glass and developing his own process for executing his designs based on lost-wax casting and pâte de verre. His works – often transparent cubes, spheres or glass shards – are frequently endowed with Latin and Greek inscriptions and contain unexpected objects such as old coins, pressed flowers, miniature imitation skulls, snakes ostensibly frozen alive, and recurrent abstract explosions of colour, which seem to at once float and solidify, captured and unleashed between walls of glass.

Glass is to time what bronze and marble are to space, says the artist, it lends material to mental space, flesh to duration. Or as John Edgar Wideman put it, Time a medium both intimate and distant. A medium transparent and opaque as glass.

Leperlier’s glass art explores the ephemeral and the fixed, memory and flux, before and after. He stops time, accords moments duration in his sculptures. Through enamel and ceramic inclusions, colourful expressive worlds reminiscent of organic forms and the universe emerge, while air bubbles, colours, and engravings create a dynamism unique in contemporary glass art.

This comprehensive monograph on Leperlier’s oeuvre demonstrates in numerous large-format images his extraordinary artistic studies on the subject of time. Statements by the artist himself as well as essays by renowned art critics and contemporaries introduce the work from different perspectives, bringing it to life in all its complexity before our very eyes.