Cécile Daladier
PRINTEMPS

02.04. — 25.05.26.

New Ceramic Works by Cécile Daladier 

Galleri Sonja is proud to present an exhibition of new works by the French artist Cécile Daladier (b. 1955). 

“While creating pique-fleurs vases, I am working with flowers and water directly in a way. Using a little water and a few small wildflowers can be considered quite futile and weak. But when you insert the stalk of a flower and place water in the pique-fleurs, you discover a strength. You discover that you are in the continuation of a creative process. You bring your own personal interpretation. Just like in music, the pique-fleurs is a kind of instrument, and you are playing it in your own way” - Cécile Daladier 

Cécile Daladier’s artistic work focuses on nature, plants and water. Although Daladier has worked with installation, painting, and collage, her practice has, in recent years, found its most concentrated expression in ceramics. Yet, her works move beyond any conventional understanding of the medium. Her vases unfold as intimate garden worlds — miniature landscapes where fragile, broken flowers take root behind protective walls, and where fragments gather into small material collages. Each piece appears as a quiet poetic gesture, a modest yet resonant manifestation.

The exhibition is curated and designed by Mentze Ottenstein.

About Cécil Daladier

Born in 1955 in Paris, France, Cécile Daladier now lives and works in rural Drôme, France. Over the past thirty years, Cécile has undertaken to create ceramic vases. Previously, she used various mediums such as painting, sculpture, design of objects, photography, and gardening plants encapsulating a central purpose: the art form as a revelatory instrument. By paying close attention to the expression of what grows, lives, dies or passes through us and reinvigorating the neglected aspects of nature and daily life, Cécile’s purpose is to create works that enable us to rediscover certain facets of things, beings, landscapes that surround us. Cécile Daladier’s artistic work focuses on nature, plants and water. 

Daladier lives in the French Alps with her husband the architect Nicolas Soulier, their dog Mousse, and their cat Tao, on the slope of a steep mountainside where almond trees blossom in spring and wild orchids emerge across the surrounding meadows. Nature is not merely a backdrop but a living presence in her work. Subtle references to Japanese raku pottery can be sensed in the surfaces and firing processes, yet this influence is transformed into something distinctly her own. As the wood-fired pieces cool, Daladier scatters dried leaves and herbs onto their surfaces, allowing smoke and ash to leave unpredictable traces. Her works hold a rare balance: a raw, unguarded immediacy paired with tenderness and care. In this tension between fragility and strength, restraint and abundance, her ceramics find their singular voice.