Works from the Lepelaar art collection

Piet Lepelaar (born 1963): collector, artist and designer from Leiden

Auction in Würzburg:
Saturday, 24 April 2021 – 2 pm (CEST)

Viewing days in Würzburg:
April, 12 until 23 from 10 am to 5 pm daily

Catalogue order

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Please make an appointment by phone or email to visit the preview and auction.

Piet Lepelaar, born 1963, is an artist and designer. His working material is what people like to call „unusable“. What an individual finds obsolete, he uses and transforms it into robotic sculptures, masks and constructions. At first glance, they seem humorous, and that is his intention. Because although his imagination sometimes has a sad or serious story, they conjure a smile on the face of the beholder.

Piet Lepelaar himself considers “een beetje een vreemde eend” - somehow a “strange bird”, “eccentric” - especially among the designers of the annual Dutch Design Month Festival, to which he was invited in 2019 under the motto: “Creating a cleaner world ”- which, seen in this way, doesn‘t make his participation that strange.

Lepelaar finds inspiration for his art in the astonishing shapes and colours of the traditional sculptures and shields of Oceania; the powerful and expressive in the African masks and figures. Works that “I admired on my regular visits to the ethnological museum in my hometown of Leiden, which fascinated me as a young man and stimulated my imagination, and which later made me a collector of traditional tribal art”.

His collection mainly includes Oceanic works from Indonesia and the Asmat cultures, alongside masks and figures from the Central African Congo regions and Angola. Works that appeal to him on a “very own aesthetic level”. Not least because each one tells its own story.

Indonesia - West New Guinea - Cenderawasih Bay (Geelvinkbaai), Collection Piet lepelaar

Indonesia - West New Guinea - Cenderawasih Bay (Geelvinkbaai)

Provenance:
Old Dutch Collection
Piet Lepelaar, Leiden

Nigeria / Cameroon, Mambila, Collection Piet Lepelaar

Nigeria / Cameroon, Mambila

Provenance:
Piet Lepelaar, Leiden

Indonesien - Westneuguinea - Cenderawasih-Bucht - Wandammen Halbinsel, Sammlung Piet Lepelaar

Indonesia - West New Guinea - Cenderawasih Bay, Wandammen peninsula

Provenance:
Old Dutch Collection
Piet Lepelaar, Leiden