Next June, Mouvements Modernes gallery is pleased to present Sam Baron’s latest creations in collaboration with Italian master glassmakers in the galleries of the Jardins du Palais Royal.

Born in France, Sam Baron holds degrees from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Saint Etienne and the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He has worked as a designer for several international brands: Dior Maison, Pierre Frey, Vista Alegre, Diptyque... and was Creative Director of the design department at Fabrica, an international communications research center based in Italy, for ten years. His creations are rooted in functional and artistic research, without neglecting cultural and historical narratives. His vision is positioned in our daily lives, through contemporary rereadings and reinterpretations of artisanal and industrial know-how.

«Design is about shaping a culture. It’s a way of questioning, transmitting and making people dream.»

In 2021, Sam collaborated on a first project with the Murano-based Berengo studio, designing a luminous floral garland as a dismantled and recomposed re-reading of a candlestick typical of the Murano glass tradition. In 2023, for the Venice Biennale, a second collaboration with the Berengo studio gave birth to «Sacrum Unguentum», a collection of works combining the unique know-how of master glassmakers and evoking the power of plants in the history of Venetian pharmacopoeia. To enhance this imaginary botanist’s album, Sam Baron turns to another master glassmaker, Massimo Lunardon, renowned for his work in borosilicate glass, and explores this story of eternal nature using another technique.

A series of unique pieces draws a surreal landscape, thanks to the skills of various master glassmakers who have perfected mouth-blowing, reticello, gold leaf and fluted glass techniques. Stems and brambles, transformed into ornamental adornments, curl or loll in harmony with various vases, basins or glass domes. The graceful movement of the flowers seems to animate them, as if to bloom at dawn or fade at dusk. To quote Mariapia Bellis and Isabelle Valembras Dahirel, curators of the exhibition in Venice, «new flowers are born, they are white, crystalline or tenebrous but, above all, they are not real flowers. Sam blossoms the petals of one flower inside another and another, as if dissecting/dismantling real flowers to create new species in his own way. Inside the recomposed corollas, the pistils intertwine like menacing snake tongues. A reference to the snakes that wrap themselves around the vases of pharmacy signs, they are a universally recognizable element, but reinterpreted.»

In the heart of the Palais Royal Gardens, Mouvements Modernes is pleased to present Sam Baron’s dreamy herbarium of strange, bewitching and enchanting flowers, summoning the fragility of glass and flowers to immerse us in this sensitive, poetic and timeless setting.