Ingrid Donat’s Porcelain Debut for Ginori 1735 Started With Advice From Diego Giacometti

Craft & Materials · Florence

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In October 2025, Ginori 1735 released Maya, a tableware collection built around the first porcelain work by French sculptor Ingrid Donat. She is better known for bronze, engraved with the scarification motifs that have defined her furniture for four decades. She came to that furniture, and to sculpture generally, because Diego Giacometti told her to. Understanding why that matters means starting with a woman who did not show her work publicly until she was 40.

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Introduction

Maya, the collection Ginori 1735 released with Ingrid Donat in October 2025, comprises five plate formats, flat, soup, dessert and bread plates among them, cast in ivory-white porcelain and finished with hand-etched surface patterns drawn directly from Donat’s sculptural language. The set extends beyond tableware into crystal wine glasses, polished silver cutlery, bronze accessories in several finishes, napkin holders, place card holders, trivets and candlesticks, and embroidered linen. It is Donat’s first work translated into porcelain, produced under Ginori 1735’s Ginori Arte initiative, the workshop’s programme for collaborating with contemporary artists rather than only reissuing historical patterns. “Porcelain surprised me,” Donat has said of the process. “It is pure, expressive, and was treated with poetic care by the Manifattura.”

Coverage of the launch understandably focused on that surprise, a sculptor known for bronze working in porcelain for the first time. The more interesting question is why Donat, at this point in a long and specific career, was the right person to ask. The answer runs through a friendship with one of the twentieth century’s more private sculptors, and through a professional life that did not begin in public until Donat was well into her forties.

Ingrid Donat, the sculptor who started in someone else’s shadow

Donat was born in France to a Swedish mother and a father from Réunion, raised in Sweden, and returned to Paris at 19. There, she trained under Silva Bernt, a sculptor and the partner of the furniture designer André Arbus, learning the sculptural techniques that would later define her own practice. It was her friendship with Diego Giacometti, brother of Alberto and a significant furniture maker in his own right, that changed the direction of her career. Giacometti encouraged Donat to develop her own furniture rather than remain within his circle’s orbit, and she began doing so through the 1980s, working out her own visual language away from any gallery or public exhibition.

That period lasted two decades. Donat designed exclusively for her own home in Paris while her husband, the auctioneer Francis Lombrail, built a significant art collection around her, and she did not launch a professional career until 1998, at 40, when she converted her own residence into a working studio. International recognition followed relatively quickly once it began: a collaboration with the dealer Barry Friedman established her reputation abroad by 2003, and in 2006 her son, Julien Lombrail, co-founded Carpenters Workshop Gallery specifically to represent her work, a gallery that has since become one of the defining venues for collectible design internationally. A career built for twenty years in private, entirely on her own terms, is not the usual route into a major design gallery’s founding roster, and it is part of why her work reads as considered rather than reactive to trend.

That same unhurried approach has continued since. Donat mounted a solo exhibition, Ooni, across Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s Paris and London spaces in 2024, and followed it with Ancestral, a New York solo show in 2025 built explicitly around personal and family history rendered in bronze. Both exhibitions extended the same working method the Maya collection draws on: pieces built slowly, in private, around a single sustained visual idea, then shown once the idea is fully resolved rather than on any external schedule. The porcelain collaboration arrived in the middle of that run rather than as a detour from it. The same month Maya launched, her earlier bronze work also appeared in Radical Making, the gallery’s Paris group exhibition spanning six decades of craft.

The scarification technique, and why porcelain changes it

Donat’s signature technique, developed across bronze, parchment and wood, is a form of surface scarification: deliberately worked marks, cut and engraved into a piece’s surface, that read as history and texture rather than decoration applied afterward. In bronze, that technique benefits from the metal’s own resistance, the marks read as evidence of real physical effort against a hard material. Porcelain does not offer the same resistance, and it does not forgive mistakes the way bronze, which can be reworked and recast, generally does.

For Maya, that meant translating a technique built around permanence and resistance into a material defined by fragility and a single firing. The Manifattura di Doccia’s artisans worked from Donat’s relief sculptures directly, hand-etching the porcelain surfaces to carry her marks without smoothing them into conventional decoration, and treating the resulting irregularities, the parts of the technique that would be considered flaws in standard tableware production, as the entire point of the object. The ivory-white palette was chosen specifically to let those textures read clearly, without competing pattern or colour pulling attention away from the surface itself.

The accessories that surround the plates carry the same idea into materials closer to Donat’s usual practice. The bronze pieces, napkin holders, place card holders, trivets and candlesticks, sit in the metal she has worked in for four decades, finished to complement rather than repeat the porcelain’s texture. Polished silver cutlery and crystal glassware supply the contrast of hard, reflective surfaces against the matte, worked porcelain, and embroidered linen softens the table further still. The porcelain is the departure; everything set around it is Donat working in territory she already knows, which is part of what keeps the collection from reading as a single experimental gesture rather than a considered table setting.

Three centuries under a name that predates its own factory

Ginori 1735 takes its name from the year Marquis Carlo Ginori began the manufactory that became Manifattura di Doccia, on his family’s estate at Doccia near Sesto Fiorentino, outside Florence, choosing that founding moment over the year the factory’s kilns actually produced their first porcelain, 1737, or the year it received the Grand Duchy of Tuscany’s formal production privilege, 1741. Carlo Ginori was a scholar and chemist as much as a manufacturer, and his own written treatise on porcelain ingredients funded early losses through profits from maiolica production while he perfected the formula. The factory passed through five generations of the Ginori family before the family sold it in 1896 to the Milanese industrialist Giulio Richard, forming Richard-Ginori, the name the brand carried for more than a century afterward.

Gucci, through the Kering group, acquired the manufactory in 2013, and Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s own creative director from 2015, became Ginori’s artistic director in the same period, a dual role that explains a great deal about the brand’s subsequent direction. The rebrand from Richard Ginori back to Ginori 1735 followed in 2020, trading a nineteenth century industrialist’s name for the founder’s original date, and the Ginori Arte programme that produced the Donat collaboration is a direct descendant of the same instinct that drove Michele’s work at Gucci: treat a heritage house’s archive as raw material for contemporary artists to work against, rather than a fixed catalogue to be reprinted.

Donat’s name now sits on a Ginori Arte roster that runs to several dozen collaborators, among them the artist Francesco Clemente, the jewellery designer Paloma Picasso, the architect and designer India Mahdavi, the designer Martino Gamper, and the design studios Studio KO and Mattia Bonetti. That list matters for how Maya should be read: it is not a single novelty pairing but one entry in an ongoing programme built specifically to test what a nearly three-hundred-year-old porcelain formula can carry when handed to people who did not train in ceramics, which is exactly the position Donat, a bronze sculptor working in porcelain for the first time, was in.

What the design argument actually is

Put those two histories together and the Donat collaboration stops looking like a licensing exercise and becomes something more specific: two parties whose entire working method is turning a private, idiosyncratic process into something that can survive contact with other people. Donat spent twenty years perfecting a visual language in total privacy before ever showing it, and her signature technique is built on marks that look hand-worked because they are. The Manifattura di Doccia has spent three centuries figuring out how to take a formula developed in one scholar’s private experiments and make it repeatable at scale without losing what made it interesting in the first place. Maya works because both halves of that partnership already knew how to do the harder version of the same job, translate something personal into something that other people can actually own.

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Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easiest way to describe Maya is a sculptor lending her signature to a porcelain maker for a season, but that framing undersells what actually had to happen to produce it. A technique built on bronze’s forgiveness had to survive a material with none, in the hands of artisans working from a formula their founder spent a fortune perfecting three centuries ago. That it works at all says something about how carefully both sides handled the translation, and about a sculptor who spent twenty years learning to trust her own hand before she ever asked anyone else to.