Spanish porcelain company Lladró has created an exclusive Our Lady of Guadalupe sculpture for the Mexican market in collaboration with MAP (Museo de Arte Popular) and Palacio del Hierro Group.
Described as a celebration of “the sheer colour, joy and beauty of Mexico’s popular art forms”, the sculpture was entirely created at the Lladró workshops in Valencia, Spain.
It features bright colours – deep blue for the mantel, red for the surrounding aura, with touches of gold and platinum – applied with age-old techniques. Also included are the roses that – as the story goes – Juan Diego picked in the dry arid land on the top of Tepeyac hill. Like all Lladró flowers, the roses are handmade and hand-painted, petal by petal.
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Our Lady of Guadalupe was hand-painted by Lladró artists using age-old techniques | |
Commissioned by MAP (Museo de Arte Popular) and created exclusively for Mexico, Our Lady of Guadalupe is a limited edition of 500 pieces. Sales proceeds will help to fund the maintenance of Mexican popular art forms undertaken by the Association of Friends of MAP.
At the same time, Lladró artists have also created a lithophane decorated with the image of Our Lady. When lit, the translucent quality of the porcelain brings out the etchings on the surface of the lamp, while giving off a soft warm light that “underscores the tender expression on her face”, the brand said.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is available in Palacio del Hierro’s shopping centres and at the museum shop at MAP.
Lladró continues international expansion
In other news, Lladró has announced eight new openings worldwide, bringing its distribution network to nearly 1,000 outlets across five continents. These include boutiques in St Martin, Guatemala and Panama, with new stores soon to open in St Thomas, Miami and Beverly Hills.
A new point of sale opens this month in Tehran, adding to recent openings in Osaka, Hong Kong and Istanbul, and underlining Asia as one of the brand’s key focal points.
The design of the new boutiques, based primarily on the colour white and curved lines, was conceived in partnership with Spanish designer Jaime Hayon, who has been collaborating with the brand for almost a decade.
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Lladró’s latest store openings are part of the brand’s expansion policy, in place since 2012 when it opened its Madison Avenue flagship in New York |
“The interior design is inspired by the idea of a gallery or museum as the ideal place to exhibit the wealth of decorative art porcelain,” Lladró President Rosa Lladró explained. “Using an organic contemporary language, the store design seeks to offer the perfect frame for the whole breadth of the brand’s sculpture, regardless of kind, shape or colour, while lending maximum visibility to the individual features of each piece.
“Here the different kinds and colouring do not compete with each other. Instead each one stands out within the space allotted to it. The simplicity of the display elements creates a platform where diversity does not produce confusion but offers each piece space to breathe,” she added.
The new boutique openings are part of the brand’s expansion policy, in place since 2012 when it opened a store at 500 Madison Avenue in New York – one of its international flagships – and in 2013 when it entered the Middle East market with an opening in Dubai.
For more information, contact Alicia González, tel: +34 96 318 70 00 (ext. 2005) and e-mail: agonzalez@es.lladro.com.
