About Galerie MiniMasterpiece

Esther de Beaucé 

Born in Paris in 1976, Esther de Beaucé grew up in an international environment with a strong focus on art and culture. Esther graduated with a degree in Anthropology from Brown University in Rhode Island, USA, and in Visual Anthropology from EHESS in Paris. She became an assistant director and producer on some fifteen films and documentary series, notably on design, in co-production with Arte and the Centre Pompidou. In 2005, she opened Schirman & de Beaucé Gallery in Paris with Caroline Schirman. The gallery promoted young French and international artists until 2012, when a new adventure began. Esther decided to continue working with visual artists, but this time in a format that was new to her: artist jewelry. She was very familiar with the existence and history of these miniature works, as her mother, Diane Venet, had been collecting them for some thirty years.

Her wish is to take up the torch—long abandoned in France—of publishing contemporary artists' jewelry. She launched her venture in the spring of 2012 by creating the MiniMasterpiece Gallery. Thirteen years later, the Gallery—still nestled at the end of a courtyard in Saint-Germain-des-Prés—has expanded. Esther collaborates with around fifty visual artists, designers, and architects. All of them are non-jewelry specialists whom she encourages to make a radical change of scale. She has organized around forty exhibitions and participated in fifteen fairs in France, Europe, and the United States. New prestigious collaborations are revealed each year, and Esther continues her work with collectors to raise awareness of this specialty, which is both jewelry and art.

La Galerie MiniMasterpiece

MiniMasterpiece Gallery—created in spring 2012 by Esther de Beaucé—is the first Parisian gallery exclusively dedicated to the production and sale of jewelry by visual artists and contemporary designers. An artist's piece of jewelry, like a sculpture, is a work of art. Born of the same creative process, it possesses the same power, poetry, provocation, and sometimes humor. Only their final destination distinguishes them: the collector's wall or their body.

However, jewelry remains a peripheral activity for these designers and visual artists, even though it incorporates all the codes specific to their approach. This is the great challenge for the artists commissioned by the gallery and the ambition of artist jewelry in general: to succeed in thinking on a new scale and for the body, without losing any of their more monumental artistic DNA.

The gallery's ambition is to commission renowned artists and designers to create unique and exclusive jewelry collaborations. To date, the following artists and designers (selection) have collaborated directly with the gallery : Joana Vasconcelos • Lee Ufan • Julio Le Parc • Jean-Luc Moulène • Wang Keping • François Morellet • Katinka Bock • Barthélémy Toguo • Françoise Pétrovitch • Maïlys Seydoux-Dumas • Yann Delacour • Elodie Seguin • Jean Grisoni • Carlos Cruz-Diez • Philippe Ramette • Phillip King • Pablo Reinoso • Sophia Vari • Andres Serrano • Faust Cardinali • Jacqueline de Jong • Christian Ghion • Pierre Charpin • Constance Guisset • Pierre Gona-lons • Mathilde Bretillot • Nestor Perkal • David Dubois • François Azambourg • A+A Cooren • Fré-déric Ruyant • Walid Akkad • Frédérique Mattei • Cédric Ragot • Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost

The gallery organizes four to five solo exhibitions each year. It also participates in several art fairs, including DESIGN MIAMI PARIS.