PIA MARIA RAEDER

and her artworks for

MISS DIOR

Exhibition Miss Dior - 12 Women Artists

At the Château de La Colle Noire, Grasse

22 November 2021

MISS DIOR EXHIBITION

Pia Maria Raederis one of the 12 international women artists chosen by the House of Dior to reinterpret the ‘Miss Dior’ bottle and design codes. Her sculptures have been on show in Château de la Colle Noire, Christian Dior’s former house, in the South of France. The exhibition will travel during the coming year. 

La Colle Noire

Credit: Jerome Galland for PCD

The perfume was born, in the words of Christian Dior, "on those evenings in Provence when "the fireflies glow and the young jasmine sings to the melody of the night and the land". For Christian Dior, Miss Dior was the perfume of love and freedom. It was created in 1947, when he was sketching the outlines of the New Look, as a tribute to his courageous sister Catherine, an active member of the French Resistance, who had survived deportation and was now devoted to flowers. The couturier decided to develop an intense green chypre. Christian Dior dreamed of "seeing his clothes come out of the bottle one by one, and the bottle was to embody the essence of femininity with its iconic bow".

Christian Dior's life story took shape through art. He studied science instead of art at his parents' request, but managed to befriend many artists in the vibrant 1920s in Paris.

The Miss Dior exhibition continues the dialogue between Christian Dior's passion for art and for women, whom he wanted to make "more beautiful" above all else.

The two sculptures by Pia Maria Raeder symbolise the brother and sister Catherine and Christian Dior. A sculpture in the silhouette of a dress embraces the Miss Dior flacon, also worked on, with the wooden stick elements typical of her work. Both sculptures bear the characteristic Dior bow. The artist has applied pink, pink, green and yellow to the tips of the wooden sticks, giving the impression of a floral dress.

THE ARTIST

Pia Maria Raeder is dedicated to interpreting her own abstract vision of nature. Beech wood elements, wooden sticks and beads are the focus of her experiments in form. Her sculptures are reminiscent of biomorphic forms and give an echo of nature. Last year, her work joined the permanent collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, France.

Pia Maria Raeder designs and handcrafts each work in her workshop in Munich. She gained worldwide fame for her "SEA ANEMONE" series, which reflects the beauty of the seabed. Launched in 2016, the collection now comprises more than twenty interior pieces.

In 2019, she developed the 'STARDUST' series, which were presented at the Salon Art+Design in New York. The artist says she is fascinated by the scene of a starry sky. All living organisms, she says, are made of this stardust, which has been traversing the universe for billions of years. With 'STARDUST' she wants to give her own interpretation of this natural phenomenon.

Each work in the 'STARDUST' collection consists of tens of thousands of beechwood half-beads carved in eight different dimensions. Comparable to a starscape, the beads are then subjected to a metallisation process based on real silver for one week. This gives the artworks the widest possible spectrum of light and gives them shimmering reflections. Depending on the viewing angle and the incidence of light, the various shades shimmer from brown to pink to gold, from blue to black to silver, in harmony with the colour spectrum of a merging supernova.