For nearly thirty-five years, Etienne Leperlier used the very special pâte de verre, or glass paste technique, drawing on its extraordinary colouring effects to make works of art and sculptures. He used architecture for his models, got his ideas from surrealism and went back to decorative arts for his shapes, thus playing an active part in the contemporary renaissance of glass-making.

Through a selection of one hundred and twenty pieces of art, this retrospective show highlights the first works produced in the 1980s in a series, in the short time when he produced numbered pieces up until the beginning of the 1990s, and finishes in the last twenty years of his life, when he created unique works of art.
Etienne’s grandfather opened in 1903 a glass paste studio in Conches, on the road going to Evreux, to create works of art using pâte de verre, and after that, stained glass windows. This pâte de verre artistic heritage as well as the family’s culture, would strongly influence the future of Etienne Leperlier. When he was a child, he would often go to the Décorchemont studio, watching his grandfather work and preparing clay rolls in the melting pots, which were needed to fire coloured glass. Later on in his life, when he was studying ethnology, he began working on pâte de verre techniques with Antoine, his brother, in his grandfather’s studio, and in 1980, he decided to work in this field.