Atelier Pierre Dedieu - Lot 0

Atelier Pierre Dedieu On Thursday, October 9, 2025 in Versailles, the second Atelier Pierre Dedieu auction will be held, featuring some 300 works sculpted by the artist from his studio, representing almost 50 years of creation. The first auction of the studio of wood sculptor Pierre Dedieu (1928-2013) held in Lyon was a remarkable event, with all works sold. First and foremost, because Dedieu's work is unique, as much for the profound originality of its inspiration as for the prodigious dexterity of its creator. Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1928, Pierre Dedieu spent most of his childhood in New Caledonia, a journey that brought him face to face with the ancestral mysteries and raw beauty of Kanak art. A sudden return to the icy winter of a country at war - this was 1940 - was not conducive to the blossoming of a shy teenager with little aptitude for studies. To his father's despair, Pierre ends up working in the shop of an art cabinetmaker renowned for restoring antique furniture. The precious and marvelous time of apprenticeship, with its gestures, materials and tools, shapes an outstanding craftsman who, beyond mastery, has also grasped that the workshop is the place of fulfillment. It wasn't long before Dedieu's desire to create began to make itself felt, initially in the direction of the decorative arts. Completely in tune with the most avant-garde air of his time, Dedieu cut free-form bowls and boxes with a dexterity that had nothing to envy that of Alexandre Noll (1890-1970), and thought about reinventing furniture. In the early 1950s, the great furniture designers of the day, Jean Royère and Jean Pascaud, invited him to exhibit in their galleries. Very quickly, the utilitarian nature of his creations gave way to a pure sculptor's gesture, expressed in abstract architectural constructions as slender as they were refined, as well as more brutal proposals, magnificently gouged out in a subtle reverence for the primitive arts. Subsequently, although he was the subject of an article in Michel Seuphor's reference work, La sculpture de ce siècle (Lausanne, éditions du Griffon, 1958), his name appeared sparingly in a few Parisian salons, such as Réalités Nouvelles in 1958. Dedieu's paradox is that the more he creates, the less he exhibits. By 1965, his sickly shyness was perfectly matched by a Kafkaesque job as a "tool builder for polishing optical mirrors" at the Paris Observatory. There, in the midst of the gigantic machinery that scrutinizes the universe, in the absolute solitude and serene, necessary isolation of these vast buildings, he elaborates in a small studio a deeply moving apprehension of the human figure, sometimes masked, sometimes draped or vegetalized, even mutant, but often illuminated with color in a surprisingly radical painterly approach. A major tribute to the sculptor was paid at the Paris Observatory in 1991, in a grandiose exhibition with a surrealist setting, punctuated by a precious little catalog. Pierre Dedieu's work spans almost seven decades. Like the great cabinet-makers of the Ancien Régime, Dedieu liked to stamp his creations with iron, but he also often dated them, sometimes a posteriori, perhaps mixing conception and realization in his mind, or perhaps he was facetiously amusing himself by blurring the tracks of a work apprehended as an astral infinity. These date references should not be taken as indicative. The extraordinary variety of wood species used, from the rarest to the most common, from the most exotic to the most local, from the hardest to the softest, from the smoothest to the gnarliest, in osmosis with an unprecedented sense of patina, reveals the perfect mastery of an artist with hundreds of tools, patiently crafting, in suspended time and with fantastic skill, bas-reliefs with hanging points that can be freely arranged, offering the eye an ever-renewed world, or delightfully graceful, even callipagic figures that instinctively elicit a caress... Pierre Dedieu's sculptural work is more than a hymn to wood, it's a declaration of love for this most sensual of materials, and it's high time we shared it with you.