ProjectsAccount

Léa Mestres

Léa Mestres is an experimental French artist who seeks to counter a design world that she sees as too serious and too male-dominated. She uses play, humour and whimsy as aesthetic devices to create colourful, anthropomorphic, larger-than-life sculptures that act as windows into the artist’s vivid imagination.

Artist Biography

Based between Paris and Audierne, Mestres creates colourful objects that stand out as bold, irreverent statements. Her research-driven work is inspired by idiosyncratic, stylised and absurd approaches that generate unrestrained expression, drawing from pop culture, music, fashion, modern art and the natural world. Mestres sculpts lamps and tables using materials like plaster, cement and metal, imbuing them with individuality through hand-crafted process. She plays with scale and proportionality to produce voluminous, oversized objects that have a dreamlike character. 

Embracing childish and instinctual creative impulses, Mestres believes it is vital to design objects that bring joy to others. These functional artworks are intentionally bright and playful, as a reflection of the artist’s own personality. Often naming her pieces after friends, family members or fictional characters, Mestres imbues them with a sense of personality and heightens their anthropomorphic quality.

Mestres' debut Craving for Crépi collection features sculptural lamps that the artist makes by carving into foam before covering them in her own special plaster. With organic shapes, tactile surfaces and vivid paint, the works celebrate imperfection and freedom through their experimental approach to texture, size and colour. The more recent Welcome to Mestresville is a series of lighting pieces and tables that use colourful mosaic tiles to depict different landscapes inspired by time spent by the artist in places like Barcelona, Dubai and the south of France. 

Exhibitions

Press

Flaunt

|

September 2023

The Nexus of Art and Design

There is perhaps no greater luxury than getting to live with a piece of art. Letting it reveal itself slowly, engaging with it at one’s own pace, and evolving...

View article