With her ingenious use of raw stones, minerals, and even fossils to create exceptional mosaics, Béatrice Serre has injected glamour and whimsy into an art form that dates back thousands of years. "The famous technique of marteline and block cutting has not changed for purists, explains the artist, who chips away marbles and granites in a labor-intensive process that often lasts days to collect a plethora of smaller jagged, imperfect shapes that she reassembles into textural expanses. "The stones have hidden treasures" she asserts. "The most difficult phase is not the endurance of the manual cutting exercise, but rather knowing how to find the right alchemy of all these materials. Every element has a special place in the composition, "down to the smallest sparkle," Serre adds, "which can transform everything."
Béatrice Serre’s Otherworldly Mosaics
August 23, 2023
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FEATURED AND RELATED ARTWORKS
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FEATURED ARTIST
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Béatrice Serre
Born in Paris, Béatrice Serre spent her childhood between Gabon, China, and Brazil. During these formative years, she found comfort in collecting stones and minerals—a constant in her ever-changing surroundings. This fascination eventually led her to the art of mosaics, which she sees as a “symbol of reconstruction, rebirth, and re-creating.”
Serre’s journey in mosaic art began at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art in Paris, where she created her first pieces. Her distinctive approach—blending traditional techniques such as block-cutting and marteling with an exquisite selection of stones and minerals—has set her work apart in the world of decorative artst. In 2018, she was awarded the gold medal at the Salon des Artistes Français, further cementing her reputation in this space.
Her mastery has drawn international recognition. In 2022, Cartier commissioned her to create a monumental Art Deco-inspired piece for their flagship mansion in New York City. Today, her works are featured in prestigious collections worldwide.
“All this prodigious mineral pathway on which I do not stop evolving, showing myself step by step, how every tessera finds its place within space and time, just like the mandala. This fabulous notion of recreating another dimension from natural elements, such as stones and minerals combined, is revealing the dazzling truth of the importance of any existence on earth and in the universe to me. This thousand-year-old craftsmanship technique is metamorphosed into contemporary mosaic, finding new horizons in architectural decoration, furniture design, the unusual object and pure artwork. The themes are inspired essentially by a combination of space and nature.
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