Piet Stockmans Celebrates 80th Birthday With Retrospective of Long-Running Career

Piet Stockmans, the Belgian ceramicist with pieces in the permanent collections 
of New York’s Metropolitan and London’s Victoria and Albert museums, turns 80 this October. To mark the milestone, Studio Pieter Stockmans is mounting a retrospective of his work and career, which he began in 1966 as an industrial designer at the Mosa porcelain factory, rising to chief designer and creating Sonja, the iconic stackable mug of which over 40 million were sold. He founded his studio in 1987, since earning accolades for exquisite hard-porcelain objects, particularly admired and utilized by such Michelin-starred chefs as Alain Ducasse and Thomas Keller. He even devised his own personal colorway, Stockmans Blue, which he discovered after experimenting with kiln temperatures. Crockery in that shade as well as crisp white, plus new items by Frank Claesen, who’s been designing at the studio for decades, are on display at C-Mine, a 1905 former coal-mine complex in Ghent, that TeamvanMeer! converted 
into Stockmans’s studio, shop, and showroom in 2010.