Design Miami 2025
Ateliers Courbet is pleased to return to Design Miami for the fair’s 20th-anniversary, December 2–7, 2025, with Neo Nouveau. The exhibition brings together contemporary works created and hand crafted by international artists and artisans whose expressions are deeply attuned to the materiality and provenance of their media.
The organic matter is explored not merely as medium but as primary inspiration behind the artists’ vocabulary. Whether carved in wood or stone in Italy, layered and shaped by mineral pigments in France, or free formed in clay in South Africa, each piece reveals the inherent character of its material through painstaking and meticulous techniques. While the featured artists work independently from around the world, they share a profound appreciation for and connection with nature and the organic material that is their respective medium of expression. The exhibition proposes the notion of Neo Nouveau as a conceptual framework—one that marks a departure from Art Nouveau’s literal interpretations of the natural world. By contrast, the works presented achieve their reverence to nature through abstract expression: pure lines and minimalist silhouettes of archetypal forms that foreground materiality itself through bare surfaces or emphasized textures. In this contemporary interpretation, nature’s essence is rendered not through ornament, but through the expressive capacity of material and restraint.
At the end of the 19th century, Art Nouveau arose from a desire to dissolve boundaries between fine and decorative arts, elevating furniture, glassware, textiles, and ceramics to the realm of high art while embracing nature as a primary source of inspiration. The contemporary works in Neo Nouveau distill these principles through abstract, biomorphic forms that honor both ancestral craftsmanship and contemporary design sensibility.
Exemplifying this notion, eleven artists from five continents will be presented with a tight selection of new and recent pieces, including Italian master woodcrafter Mauro Mori, South African ceramicist Katherine Glenday, French artist Pierre Bonnefille, Brazilian ceramic artist Valéria Nascimento, Spanish designer Veronica Mar, Greek-American ceramicist Peter Speliopoulos, American designer Jonathan Hansen, Polish artist Daniel Kolodziejczak, Swedish ceramicist Emelie Abrahamsson, American sculptor Ethan Stebbins, and Burkina Faso based design edition Maison Integre. The pieces exhibited were hand-crafted from or with natural materials, such as tree trunks, marble blocks, and stoneware ceramic, using meticulous, time-honored techniques.
The exhibition at Design Miami aims to highlight the natural dialogue between the selected bodies of work, allowing the pieces to shed light on each others differences and relations.
