European Ceramics @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - "Making It Modern: European Ceramics from the Martin Eidelberg Collection" Exhibition

Making It Modern

European Ceramics from the Martin Eidelberg Collection

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

June 16, 2025 - January 4, 2026

Making It Modern: European Ceramics from the Martin Eidelberg Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art highlights more than 60 ceramic works dating from the 1880s to 1910s that showcase the aesthetic, conceptual, and technical experimentation of ceramic artists in Europe. Working in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, these artists sought to break from the past by developing new, distinctive modes of making. With a renewed interest in the natural world as a source of artistic inspiration, they experimented with decoration, forms, and ideas to make their art modern. The exhibition features a selection drawn from a gift of approximately 80 ceramics given to The Met by scholar Martin Eidelberg in the years 2022–24.

“This exhibition brings into focus a pivotal moment at the turn of the century when ceramics were central to the exploration of modernism across Europe and across the fine and decorative arts,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Met. “The incredible originality and creativity of these works offer clear evidence of the dramatic changes in ceramic design and production during this period. Thanks to the generosity of Martin Eidelberg, an extraordinary collector and prolific scholar, we can better appreciate these truly outstanding objects within their larger historical context.”

The years in which the Eidelberg ceramics were produced coincided with the emergence of the popular Art Nouveau movement in which artists brought abstracted forms from nature into their work. Few of these pieces, however, align closely with the common conception of that style. Instead, these ceramics reflect the desire for individual artistic expression and the enormous creativity that make this period such a rich chapter in European ceramic history.

Another formative influence on this new style’s development came from the interest in Asian ceramics, particularly Japanese stoneware. While European fascination in the arts of Asia was long-standing, this interest had a new focus: the artisanal experimentation emphasizing the sculptural form of the vessel and the abstract application of glazes. This aesthetic of imperfection was revelatory to European audiences.

Among the exhibition’s key objects are an extraordinary large circular plaque produced at the Rozenburg factory in the Netherlands with a painted decoration that has no historical precedents; a gourd-shaped vase by the ceramic artist Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat that reflects the new focus on nonfunctional, organically inspired shapes with abstract glazes largely determined by the firing process; and an openwork vase seemingly formed of overlapping nasturtium leaves and stems produced by the celebrated Danish factory of Bing & Grondahl. All of these objects are a manifestation of the desire of artist-potters and ceramic factories at the end of the 19th century to create new modes of expression that allowed them to explore highly original forms and methods of decoration.

Sarah E. Lawrence, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Curator in Charge of The Met’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, said, “This exhibition captures a remarkable moment in the history of ceramics that centers the decorative arts in the formation of early modernism. European ceramic artists intentionally sought distinctive modes of making their art modern, though innovations of form and experimentations in material, shape, technique, and glazes.”

Guest curator Jeffrey Munger added, “The aim of this exhibition is to highlight the creativity of ceramic artists in Europe at the end of the 19th century. A common goal was to produce new forms and types of decoration that reflected the dawn of a new century, and the variety of means that were explored in this pursuit demonstrate the remarkable inventiveness and innovative spirit of artist-potters at this time.”

Making It Modern: European Ceramics from the Martin Eidelberg Collection is curated by Sarah E. Lawrence, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Curator in Charge of The Met’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and guest curator Jeffrey Munger.

The exhibition is accompanied by an issue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin.

Making It Modern: European Ceramics 

from the Martin Eidelberg Collection

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 

Volume 82 | Number 4 | Spring 2025  

Lawrence, Sarah E., Martin P. Eidelberg, and Jeffrey H. Munger

48 pages, 44 illustrations, 8.5 x 11 in

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

www.metmuseum.org

Akinsanya Kambon @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills

Akinsanya Kambon

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills 

April 17 – May 31, 2025

Marc Selwyn Fine Art presents Akinsanya Kambon, the gallery’s first exhibition of work by the artist.

Akinsanya Kambon, born Mark Teemer in Sacramento, California, is a former Marine, Black Panther, and art professor who lives and works in Long Beach. Kambon served in Vietnam as a Marine infantryman and combat illustrator. Upon returning to the U.S., he joined the Sacramento Chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and served as its Lieutenant of Culture. Kambon’s lifetime of service and artistic practice document suppressed histories and express the beauty of African heritage through drawing, painting, and sculpture. In 2023, Kambon won the prestigious Mohn Award given by the Hammer Museum for his participation in “Made in LA 2023: Acts of Living”. His life, work, and mission are also the subject of a documentary film “The Hero Avenges” to be released this year. Akinsanya Kambon will be the subject of an upcoming one-person exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York, in May of 2026.

Akinsanya Kambon’s rich body of work is influenced by his Pan-Africanist beliefs, developed through his extensive travels through Africa beginning in 1974. Kambon explains, “I’ve looked at African spirituality and I like to incorporate what I’ve learned into my own work. My biggest influences have been my travels to Africa.” The show will include ceramic vessels, figures, and wall plaques that combine American historical narratives with African sculptural traditions.

To create his ceramics, Akinsanya Kambon uses a Western version of the Japanese Raku firing technique which adds a metallic luster to his glazed surfaces. This method of firing, which traps smoke in an enclosed space to interact with the glaze, produces an uncontrollable transformation which Kambon considers a spiritually guided aspect of this practice. He conducts kiln firings with a ceremonial approach, infusing life into figures that often embody African deities, spirits, or figures from American or religious history. His work, deeply rooted in narrative tradition and shaped by his personal experiences, celebrates themes of resilience through adversity, cultural pride, and his talent as a storyteller.

In ‘Black Butterfly,’ 2024, for example, Akinsanya Kambon depicts the figure of the Queen Mother butterfly of the Bobo people, who was sent by God to bring rain. In 'The Edler' Kambon portrays a strong warrior with a turtle on his head, a symbol of longevity and wisdom. Other figures are incorporated into vases and vessels, as in ‘Kemetic Gate Keepers’, 2015, where protectors of the spirit world are represented in the vessel’s handles and base.  ‘The Ancestors,’ 2015, tells the story of the first humans on earth alongside the ‘primordial animals’ that preceded us. 

Solo exhibitions include: Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2022); Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, (2020); Pan African Art Gallery & Studio, Long Beach, California (1991); and the Oak Park School of Afro-American Thought, Sacramento City College (1969). Recent group exhibitions include those at Rowan University Art Gallery and Museum, Glassboro, NJ, (2025); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Oakland Museum of California (2016) and Joyce Gordon Gallery, Oakland (2016). He is the recipient of awards from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (2022); City of Long Beach (1996, 1994); County of Los Angeles (1994); and California Wellness Foundation, Violence Prevention Initiative (1993).

MARC SELWYN FINE ART

9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212

www.marcselwynfineart.com

Miquel Barceló @ Acquavella Galleries, New York - Paintings and Ceramics Exhibition

Miquel Barceló

Acquavella Galleries, New York

April 24 - May 30, 2025

Acquavella Galleries presents MIQUEL BARCELÓ, the renowned Spanish artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition presents over two dozen new paintings and a selection of recent ceramic works, featuring the artist’s signature use of layered materiality, vivid color, and richly textured surfaces.

Over the past four and a half decades, the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló (b. 1957) has explored a diverse range of media, including painting, works on paper, ceramic, bronze sculpture, large-scale installation, and performance. In addition to his deep-rooted connection to Spain and his native Mallorca, Miquel Barceló draws inspiration from his global travels, continuously experimenting with new materials and techniques influenced by ancient and contemporary cultural traditions. Throughout his practice, the artist’s fascination with the natural world has been central, resulting in textured canvases filled with earthly materiality, tactile surfaces, and compositions inspired by the effects of light and ever-changing colors of the sea.

MIQUEL BARCELÓ

Par terre avec as de coeur, 2024

Mixed media on canvas

63 1/4 x 63 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches (160.5 x 160.5 x 7 cm)

© Miquel Barceló, courtesy Acquavella Galleries

In his latest series of paintings, Miquel Barceló deepens his engagement with organic subject matter, drawing inspiration from the sea surrounding Mallorca, where he lives and works in addition to Paris. In densely layered surfaces, Barceló’s new “still life” paintings feature scenes filled with tropical fish, crabs, shells, crustaceans, and marine vegetation that emerge from layers of muted chromatic grays in brilliant hues of red and blue. Traces of human presence also appear within these aquatic compositions as Barceló often incorporates found materials including matchbooks and postage stamps amid hundreds of layers of paint. In Par terre avec as de coeur (2024), for instance, a playing card appears alongside crabs and shells, seamlessly blending into the composition. As Miquel Barceló explains, the process is almost geological, “like waves washing over a beach.”

MIQUEL BARCELÓ

Reloj parado, 2023-2024-2025

Mixed media on canvas

45 1/8 x 64 x 3 1/8 inchs (114.5 x 162.5 x 8 cm)

© Miquel Barceló, courtesy Acquavella Galleries

Alongside Barceló’s still lifes are striking underwater scenes, inspired by both the open sea as well as aquariums. Although a lifelong diver, the prescribed environment of the aquarium offers the artist a unique opportunity for experimentation. In works like Scene (2025) and Peixos exotics (2025), Miquel Barceló creates powerful compositions teeming with tropical aquatic life in swirling brilliant color. As the artist observes, an aquarium is a “closed space where colors, shapes, and materials evolve in improbable combinations. For me, that’s a good definition of painting.”

The exhibition also includes a selection of new paintings from the artist’s corrida series, depicting the circular space of the bullfighting ring, which offers Barceló a similarly enclosed space to experiment. In Reloj parado (2023-2024-2025), two lone figures stand at the center of a yellow ground, encircled in the ring by vibrant reds, greens, and blues. Miquel Barceló builds each composition in multiple layers of saturated color where the dramatic interplay between “life and death” and “light and shadow” unfold.

Barceló’s ceramic practice similarly emerged from his surroundings. He began experimenting with the medium in the 1990s in Mali, where he studied ancient Dogon earthenware techniques unique to the country’s central region. Drawn to clay for its humble materiality, he embraced it as a medium of experimentation, describing ceramics as “a form of painting.” Barceló’s distinctive forms and contours, molded by the artist’s hands, are painted in vivid colors and often revisit the subjects and material qualities of his paintings. In Tectònic (2024), a simple vessel is coated in dense crags as if it slowly emerged from the earth, while in Copinyes (2024), shells and crustaceans appear from soft, bubbling surfaces glazed in violet. These works show Barceló’s expressive and free-wheeling hand, and much like his paintings, they illustrate his engagement with the materials, traditions, and environments endemic to his surroundings.

Miquel Barceló is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published by Rizzoli.

About Miquel Barceló (b. 1957)

Miquel Barceló was born in Felanitx, Mallorca in 1957 and currently lives and works in Mallorca, Spain, and Paris, France. The youngest artist to ever show at the Musée du Louvre, Miquel Barceló represented Spain at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and participated in Documenta VII in Kassel, Germany in 1982. He has had retrospectives at renowned institutions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; and is included in many esteemed public and private collections worldwide. Miquel Barceló has had several solo exhibitions in recent years, including one featuring his ceramics at the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza in 2019, a solo exhibition titled Metamorphosis at the Museo Picasso, Málaga in 2021, and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2022.

Along with his exhibition at Acquavella, Miquel Barceló will present three other solo exhibitions this year at the Fondation Jan Michalski, Montricher, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art of Eivissa, Spain; and the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES NEW YORK

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.acquavellagalleries.com

Ceramist Alain Vernis @ HdM Gallery, Beijing - "Black" Exhibition

Alain Vernis | Black 

HdM Gallery, Beijing

9 April - 10 May 2025

HdM Gallery and Luohan Tang present Black, a solo exhibition by artist ALAIN VERNIS. The exhibition features over a dozen ceramic bowls, focusing on the artist’s exploration and enlightement of ceramics over the years.

Alain Vernis: The charm of simplicity

Alain Vernis's works are mainly pottery bowls. Since he set up his studio in the Haut-Morvan in 1985, he has started to make pottery with local clay. Alain Vernis didn’t learn from a master, he relied on his own exploration from kiln construction to firing. The primitive pit that he used then caused all of the pieces, shaped over ten years, to explode. He had no choice but to give up pit firing and build a new kiln. After years of adjustments, he came to discover the effects of diverse combinations of clay, water, duration of firing, type of wood. Black was once used by Taoism to discribe the invisible and intangible universe, “Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding. ”  Darkness presents color and also the profoundness of Taoism. Alain Vernis uses black extensively in his works, shaping through “renouncement” and firing with “naturalness” . The combination of shape and glaze color explains the charm of simplicity.

 

Alain Vernis: Deep connection with Raku-yaki technique

The famous Raku-yaki technique of the Momoyama period in Japan in the 16th century is characterized by simplicity and naturalness. The seemingly "imperfect" works break the traditional aesthetic system of symmetry and glaze perfection, which is similar to Alain Vernis's works. Starting with a handful of clay, Alain focuses his perception on his hands and slowly kneads the bowl into shape, combining the beauty of form with the beauty of spirit. The surface of the bowl is either smooth or rough, with the glaze color bolding, and even natural flow appears. However, it was not until the 15th generation of Raku-yaki master invited him to Japan that he realized that he had such a deep connection with those masters of several centuries ago.

 

Alain Vernis was born in Sens, France in 1946 and currently lives and works in Morvan. His works have been exhibited in art institutions such as the Biracte Archaeological Museum in Burgundy, Guardian Art Center in China and Musée d‘art Moderne, Musée national de la Céramique, Musée de Bibracte, Musée Asrien Dubouché, Musée Bernard Palissy, Musée de Sarreguemines, Musée Joseph Séchelette in France.

HdM GALLERY

798 East Road, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing

hdmgallery.com

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Exhibition Overview

Monstrous Beauty 

A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

March 25 – August 17, 2025

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a major exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, which radically reimagine the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s pervasive fantasies of both the East and the exotic along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition interrogates the ways in which this mutable, fragile material that shaped European women’s identities in the past also led to the construction of abiding racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy removed from the present, Monstrous Beauty casts a critical glance at inherited attitudes toward the style, exploring how negative stereotypes can be reclaimed as terms of female empowerment.

“Monstrous Beauty examines the multifaceted legacy of chinoiserie in 18th-century Europe,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “By illuminating the beauty of the object and the power of this art form to reflect, distort, and dictate the ways in which women's identities have been shaped and perceived across time, this thought-provoking exhibition invites viewers to engage with the past in new ways."

Iris Moon, Associate Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met, said, “Monstrous Beauty is both a story of enchantment and a necessary unraveling of harmful myths from the past—myths about the exotic—that have a hold over the present. It is time to retell the history of chinoiserie.”

Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works, from 16th-century European works to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates how chinoiserie ornament actively constructed cross-cultural ideas of female desire and agency. Much sought after as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East in the 1700s, porcelain accumulated a variety of associations over the course of its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a charged metaphor for women.

Contemporary works by Asian and Asian American women artists counteract chinoiserie’s stereotypes of exoticism by reclaiming the monstrous as a source of artistic possibility. The exhibition’s central atrium draws viewers in with an installation of Yeesookyung’s porcelain vessels, which feature broken shards mended and turned into dazzling monsters using the kintsugi repair method. Viewers themselves form an active part of the exhibition, joining the conversation between works from the past and pieces by contemporary artists, including a new commissioned work by Patty Chang. Abyssal is a full-size massage table made of raw, unglazed porcelain punctured by holes. After the exhibition closes, the table will be sunk in the Pacific Ocean. Instead of a sturdy horizontal support for a passive body, Patty Chang’s massage table is reimagined as an uncanny object with orifices. Patty Chang writes, “The holes put the body in doubt.” Raising questions about who or what we choose to see, the work recalls the unseen labor of Asian women spa workers, such as the six women killed during the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. Abyssal is also about the possibility of afterlives, regeneration, and transformation. Underwater, the table will serve as a deposit for growing coral.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie: Exhibition Overview

Through a lens of curiosity and critique, porcelain reemerges here as a politically charged material that changed women’s lives. Five thematic sections introduce a mix of unexpected protagonists into the story of porcelain: queens, mothers, monsters, starlets, shoppers, and cyborgs. The style’s inventive language gave voice to novel tastes and identities, but also created lasting stereotypes that are difficult to break. The works of contemporary Asian and Asian American women artists are strategically positioned throughout the five thematic sections to rupture the illusion of a seamless continuity between past and present.

The exhibition begins with porcelain’s arrival in Europe via maritime trade. Porcelain appeared as strange and marvelous, when blue-and-white plates from Asia began arriving by sea in the 16th century. Merchants used porcelain from China as ballast, its weight offering ships stability in rough seas, before realizing they could sell it to eager consumers. Soon, shiploads of porcelain were being auctioned off in Europe by the late 1600s, even as anxieties around shipwrecks, warfare, and colonial violence surfaced obliquely in monstrous decorative motifs.

The next section explores how Mary II, Queen of England, developed an obsession with Asian ceramics in the late 1600s, giving birth to a taste for chinoiserie that influenced generations of women collectors in Europe. Mary’s main role as queen of England was to birth an heir. Instead, she gave birth to a taste for porcelain, which functioned as a surrogate body, a way to reproduce her presence by filling residences with bright ceramics, textiles, and lacquer panels. This feminine, personal take on chinoiserie contrasted with the French monarchy’s uses of the exotic to assert absolutist power.

Tea became ingrained in European culture, and the following section explores how this exotic beverage was turned into a potent symbol of civility that set Europe apart from the “savage” territories it exploited as well as the women who were in charge of cultivating a world of politeness in the home. Porcelain objects gained strong associations with women at a moment when public debates aired collective anxieties around their growing voices as consumers, tastemakers, and citizens.

Through the porcelain figurines that proliferated in 18th-century Europe, porcelain shaped notions of womanhood in unexpected ways. A shifting cast of goddesses, mothers, monsters, and performers, often clothed in gaudy costumes and adopting exaggerated poses, appeared. A starting point for later stereotypes surrounding the Asian woman, these figurines also put pressure on the fixed European vision of womanhood. These small, toylike objects paired with the period’s dazzling painted export mirrors serve as vehicles for reflecting on women’s self-perceptions—on how they wanted to see themselves versus the images imposed on them.

The exhibition closes with the long afterlives of chinoiserie into the 20th century and beyond. This was a period when modern Asian women directly grappled with the stereotypes created by the legacy of a historical style that conflated Asian femininity with traditional luxury objects and European consumption. The American imagination reshaped the style through film and photography. Like porcelain, these media provided a glossy substrate upon which fantasy images of the Asian woman could be projected and reproduced, and also contested.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie is curated by Iris Moon, Associate Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition:

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Author: Iris Moon

256 pages, 172 illustrations

Paperback, 7 1/4" x 10 1/2"

ISBN: 9781588397928

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

www.metmuseum.org

Beginner Ceramics, a Brooklyn-based ceramics studio founded by Jesse Hamerman @ Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York - "The Possibilities Are Endless" Exhibition

Beginner Ceramics

The Possibilities Are Endless

Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

March 21 - April 26, 2025

Rachel Uffner Gallery presents The Possibilities Are Endless, a solo exhibition by Beginner Ceramics, a Brooklyn-based ceramics studio founded by Jesse Hamerman. The show features a striking range of hand-built sculptural objects ranging from vases to mirrors to lamps. Infused with bold colors, dynamic textures, and playful geometries, the pieces embrace traditional notions of functionality while exploring the tactile, expressive possibilities of clay. 

Jesse Hamerman founded Beginner Ceramics in 2021, rekindling a passion for clay that had lain dormant since college. After spending 22 years collaborating with artists to fabricate ambitious, large-scale works in a variety of media, Jesse Hamerman returned to ceramics with a deep well of technical knowledge and an open mind. "Exploring form with the mind of a beginner and creating with joy is the goal with every object," says Jesse Hamerman, reflecting on the ethos of the studio. 

Beginner Ceramics’ objects are rooted in minimalism and geometric abstraction, evident in the rhythmic linear handles that frame the vessels and the gestural swatches of color that dance across their surfaces. All of the studio’s objects are iterations on a similar formal theme, in the vein of Sol Lewitt, Fred Sandback, and other minimalists. This interplay between structure and spontaneity creates a dynamic tension, where the precise, symmetrical forms contrast with the painterly energy of the surface treatments.

The works in the show also radiate an undeniable sense of playfulness. Glazed in an exuberant spectrum of hues – electric blues, soft pastels, vibrant yellows, and earthy neutrals – each piece carries a distinct character, heightened by the vibrant, hand-painted walls. Looped handles, layered ridges, and the interplay of glossy and matte surfaces evoke movement and energy, creating a dynamic environment for the appreciation of craftsmanship.

The Possibilities Are Endless offers an opportunity to experience Beginner Ceramics’ work in an immersive setting, where form and function blur, and everyday objects become sculptural statements.

RACHEL UFFNER GALLERY

170 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002

racheluffnergallery.com

Jacqueline Poncelet @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, London - "this, that and the other" Exhibition

Jacqueline Poncelet

this, that and the other

Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

11 March – 3 May 2025

Jacqueline Poncelet

Untitled, 1985 c.

© Jacqueline Poncelet / Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Belgian-born, London-based artist JACQUELINE PONCELET (b. 1947), whose pioneering approach to colour, material, surface, and space has redefined the boundaries between fine art and craft. Spanning fifty years of work, this, that and the other brings together Poncelet’s early sculptural ceramics, large-scale drawings, and small paintings from the 1970-1980s with recent watercolours and composite paintings, tracing a continuous dialogue between material, process, and pattern across diverse media. This is Poncelet’s first major London presentation in over 20 years, following her major retrospective at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) last year.

Working on the fringes of the American Pattern & Decoration and the French Supports/Surfaces movements, Poncelet’s practice has never been confined to a single medium, moving fluidly between ceramics, painting, drawing, photography, textiles and site-specific design. Unlike many of her male contemporaries in the New British Sculpture movement, her work remained deeply engaged with material instability, ignoring the boundaries between fine art and craft. 

She first gained recognition in the 1970s for her sculptural ceramics, which explored modular variation and repetition. A selection of small vessels on view from this period demonstrates how she transformed decorative objects into works of art through subtle interventions in pattern and form, challenging traditional expectations of ‘craft’ and functional design. 

A major turning point came in 1986, when she participated in the Venice Biennale, presenting sculptural ceramics resembling fragmented, tangled limbs, starkly arranged on a white platform. These works abandoned traditional associations with ceramics, instead evoking disembodied, visceral forms, reflecting both personal and cultural tensions at the time. This approach is echoed in exhibited works such as Handbag (1985) and Object in Four Parts (1986), where Jacqueline Poncelet embraced a more architectural, constructivist sensibility. These pieces feature folded, stacked, and interlocking elements, their surfaces enriched with embossed wallpaper textures and painted finishes, reinforcing her fascination with pattern, repetition, and material complexity. At times resembling fragmented architectural facades, at others recalling the draped quality of textiles, these ceramics redefine the relationship between form and function, marking a pivotal moment in her practice.

Such sculptural works are shown alongside large-scale drawings and small paintings from the 1980s, which reflect her exploration of form, space and structure on a two-dimensional plane. Using interwoven lines, gridded compositions, and layered washes of colour, Poncelet experimented with the optical tension between depth and flatness. Her exhibited Untitled drawings almost recall architectural blueprints, mapping out imagined spaces and objects through multiple shifting perspectives at once. Her small paintings from this period reflect similar ideas, typically juxtaposing rigid geometric structures and definitive blocks of colour with more organic, meandering forms. This playful push and pull between order and fluidity, structure and improvisation, remains central to her work.

The grids and weaves of these works are taken a step further by Poncelet with her composite paintings, such as Kiss c.1995, which literally integrate handwoven elements, digital printing, and painted forms, layering different processes, textures, and imagery within a single surface. Echoing the grid-like structures of her early paintings, these works continue Poncelet’s interest in probing the tension between precision and spontaneity, structure and disruption.

The focus on pattern and movement is central to her more recent works on paper included in the exhibition. A selection of smaller geometric watercolours from 2009–2023 are characterised by fine pencil lines, intricate grid formations, and vivid colour. Inspired by the natural world and the changing seasons, these meticulous works balance precision with fluidity, using carefully constructed frameworks to explore rhythm, optical movement, and spatial depth. 

Her most recent watercolours from 2023 take a more gestural, expansive approach, reflecting an increasing interest in landscape and memory, particularly inspired by her time in Wales. Built up in layered washes of colour, these works move away from the structured geometry of her earlier pieces, embracing a more organic, shifting visual language that evokes horizons, changing light, and atmospheric transformation.

Poncelet’s work is held in major public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Though historically overlooked in favor of male contemporaries, her contributions to British sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and public art are now receiving overdue recognition. 

this, that and the other showcases Jacqueline Poncelet’s five-decade exploration of colour, material, pattern, and space, highlighting her enduring impact as one of the most important living artists working at the intersection of art and design.

JACQUELINE PONCELET - BIOGRAPHY

Born in Liège, Belgium, Jacqueline Poncelet is a pioneer in ceramics and textiles. Renowned primarily for her simple, bone china ceramics, Poncelet's work shifted after a trip to NYC in 1978/79. Inspired by the urban environment, she started replicating artificial patterns through the use of the incised line or via coloured clays leaving behind industrial techniques to create unique hand built shapes.

Returning to England in the 1980s, Jacqueline Poncelet became loosely associated with the New British Sculpture movement at the time, led by Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor and Bill Woodrow who were reacting to the prevailing ideas of Minimal and Conceptual art. As a woman, and the wife of Richard Deacon, she was overshadowed by her male contemporaries, never achieving the same level of success despite being actively collected by major museums and having two major solo shows during that decade (at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1985 and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 1988). The '90s heralded the start of the YBA movement, and her work fell out of favour in the commercial art world. Jacqueline Poncelet focused on large-scale public art commissions and teaching. In 2009, she was commissioned by Art on the Underground to make a permanent work for Edgware Road Tube station; Wrapper was completed in 2012. In 2013, she was commissioned by Tate Enterprises to work with Melin Tregwynt in Pembrokeshire to produce woven textiles, which are now available at Tate Britain and Tate Modern to purchase in the museums' shops.

Jacqueline Poncelet lives and works between London and the South Wales Valleys. She studied at Wolverhampton College of Art and the Royal College of Art from 1966 until 1972. Poncelet is represented in important public collections throughout the world, including Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Stedeljk Museum in Amsterdam; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

RICHARD SALTOUN GALLERY | LONDON

41 Dover Street,, London W1S 4NS

www.richardsaltoun.com

Ceramist Fiona Waterstreet @ Maya Froderman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Vessels" Exhibition

Fiona Waterstreet: Vessels

Maya Froderman Gallery, Jackson Hole

February 14 - March 30, 2025

FIONA WATERSTREET

Untitled, 2024 

Stoneware, 12 x 12 x 19 ½ inches

© Fiona Waterstreet / Courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

FIONA WATERSTREET

Untitled, 2024 

Stoneware, 12 x 12 x 19 ½ inches

© Fiona Waterstreet / Courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

FIONA WATERSTREET

Untitled, 2024 

Stoneware, 12 x 12 x 19 ½ inches

© Fiona Waterstreet / Courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY presents Vessels, a solo exhibition with English ceramicist FIONA WATERSTREET.

Fiona Waterstreet is a maestro of tactile expression. Having spent her career developing an organic aesthetic, her ceramics convey a distinct humanism in the enduring trace of her hand found in each object. Vessels, her second solo exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery, presents fifteen recent ceramic works and five drawings that exemplify Waterstreet’s winsome coalescence of hand-building and drawing.

When Fiona Waterstreet first started working with clay at the Greenwich House Pottery Studio in New York nearly fourteen years ago, she was largely throwing on a wheel. Despite having no previous arts education, and ceramics being a largely ignored branch of the fine arts, she says that she fell in love with the tactility and uncertainty of working with clay. “The art thing started to seep into me,” Waterstreet remembers. She began creating more sculptural objects, bringing a form to life within her hands. Fiona Waterstreet enjoyed the meditative process that begins in water and minerals and ends in anticipation as it transforms within a fiery kiln as she began making abstracted birds and forms from porcelain. “Ceramics are a nut you have to crack,” says Fiona Waterstreet. “There’s an intrigue to it. Every time you open the kiln, you’re surprised.” Since then, Waterstreet has also held solo exhibitions with McClain Gallery of Houston, Texas, and the Drawing Room, East Hampton, New York.

Her newest body of work includes pieces that nod to her earlier practice. One such piece is the stoneware bowl, which was the only work in the exhibition created on a potter’s wheel. Despite this, the bowl finds affinity in her recent work through the expressive, sweeping brushstrokes that dance across its surface. Vessels also includes a set of two small bird forms, bulbous, elegant, and curious. The gentle tilt of the neck, the arch of the back, and the details of the beak: these works, more traditional to Fiona Waterstreet’s oeuvre, show her propensity for capturing the je ne sais quoi of the avian spirit in an organic, abstracted form.

Vessels marks a watershed in Waterstreet’s practice in her ability to go bigger through hand-building, as one monumental vessel stands nearly three feet tall. It was also an exercise of taking the universal form of a vessel and pushing it out of simple functionality, and out of tradition. Many of Waterstreet’s vessels recall those from antiquity, with a subtle cracking to their glaze, caused by Waterstreet’s use of terra sigillata, an ancient Italian method of putting an ultra-refined slip on the clay that tends to crackle in the firing process. Meaning “earth seal,” terra sigillata was used by ancient Greeks and Romans to make vessels watertight, but Fiona Waterstreet experimented with terra sigillata to create surface texture and add color to her works. Other works are subtly carved with leaf motifs. This “drawing” on the surface of her vessels was a novel way for Fiona Waterstreet to imprint her organic aesthetic onto each piece, another way the viewer can see the perennial presence of Waterstreet’s hand. The exhibition brings these works together with her realist pencil drawings. Many of these works were done in 2020, when Fiona Waterstreet, isolated and without her kiln, began drawing portraits of all the people she could not see in person at the time. Her more pastoral location, away from the hustle and bustle of the Soho loft home and studio she shares with her husband, artist John Alexander, inspired her to create studies of bird nests and leaves that later inspired her most recent ceramics.

Fiona Waterstreet’s high relief vessels, whose forms are abstracted and concealed by tangles of leaves, mimic the carvings and motifs of her other works. These works exude a similar air of antiquity as if they were pulled out of a long-forgotten country home enveloped in vines. Working through the abstraction of organic forms, she manages to retain the traditional essence of each object. “It’s the crux of what I do. I have a formality to myself, and I have a formality to my work, but it’s not interesting to me unless I can take it a bit further, unless I can bring abstraction in.” Building each vessel by hand, Fiona Waterstreet relishes in the process of distortion that follows. In working with organic forms and a feminine hand, she creates forms that embody elegance as much as they exude whimsy. As she has honed her distinct style over the past fourteen years, Waterstreet’s practice is one of experimentation, and by proxy, of transmutation. “I often wonder what my work will be like in five years… Really, I feel like I’m in the early stages of my journey.”

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

Kristina Riska @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Uncertainties" Exhibition

Kristina Riska: Uncertainties

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

November 29, 2024 – January 12, 2025

Kristina Riska’s artistic process harnesses both the delicate malleability and the willful nature of clay. The artist describes herself as battling her material, attempting to achieve the impossible, which is why she was unsure until the last minute before the show’s opening how many of her sculptures would survive intact. When working with clay, one must humble oneself before the material – clay insists upon writing its own narrative. Its size and shape are transformed during firing in the kiln, as are the textures and colors imparted by glazes, thus conferring a key role to chance in the birthing process of ceramic art.

As an entirely new feature in Riska’s art, many of her recent sculptures are propped on struts, some resembling Japanese wooden geta sandals, others rounder like wheels or pompoms. By resting her sculptures on inbuilt pedestals, Kristina Riska has freed up wholly new avenues of expression in her construction of form. Each sculpture tells its own mini-story, and the titles hint at the underlying meanings in subtle, oblique ways. Instead of having a clear uniting theme, the sculptures in this exhibition were created intuitively, in states of mind ranging from joy to sorrow. They are richly diverse in style, yet each one has a counterpart or companion piece with which it engages in dialogue, creating cohesion within the exhibition.

Working with clay is just as inspiring to Kristina Riska today as it was forty years ago. She describes it as a huge privilege and gift. At the heart of her process is her desire to distill her craft to its purest essence – to strip everything down to the essentials and achieve total integrity of expression. While immersed in a project, she avoids looking at the work of other artists and strives to concentrate purely on her own creative process.

Kristina Riska (b. 1960) is one of Finland’s most internationally renowned ceramic artists. Her studio is based on the premises of the Arabia Art Department Society in Helsinki. She has won international awards and has exhibited her work everywhere, from the United States to Denmark and Japan. Her sculptures are held in numerous international private collections, as well as the collections of the Saastamoinen Foundation and the Finnish and Swedish governments.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Artist Chloé Peytermann @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Bark or the Poney" Exhibition of Ceramic Sculpture

Chloé Peytermann: Bark or the Poney

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

10 May - 9 June 2024

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN

Blue Love, 2024 

Ceramic, 10 x 5 ½ inches

© Chloé Peytermann, courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN

The Boat, 2024

Ceramic, 5 ¼ x 7 ½ inches

© Chloé Peytermann, courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN

The Hug, 2024 

Ceramic, 7 ½ x 3 ¼ inches

© Chloé Peytermann, courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY (formerly Tayloe Piggott Gallery) presents The Bark or the Poney, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculpture by French artist CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN.

“It's hard for me to give up images / I need the plowshare to go through me / Mirror of winter, of age / I need to be seeded by time.”

- Philippe Jaccottet

Citing the a poem by Swiss Francophone poet and translator Jaccottet, Chloé Peytermann also wrote the following about this solo exhibition, her first with Maya Frodeman Gallery: 

“Recently, in the workshop and in my hands, things took a surprising turn, and I was the first to be surprised.It was a turn towards a form of figuration, or an abstraction becoming figurative. Human characters and animals, often fanciful, shaped at speed, the fruit of an inspired gesture, in search of a fleeting emotion or a meaningful movement. Moments of tenderness, of doubt, of strangeness, of promise, are frozen, as it were, in the fired clay and the matte surface of the glaze. In these small paradoxical objects is an expression which swells up as it is pared down; waiting for its emergence, I stay somehow aloof, without feeling proud. The glaze is their skin, the ceramic material is there in all its power, revealing the spontaneity of touch, containing the form within a gentleness which holds on to time. Immutable snapshots of an instant, these clay sketches have found an anchor, taken their place and formed a society. They are characters looking at us and questioning us in our own epoch, but issued from a distant and legendary past. They seem to have withdrawn from our noisy world. They are waiting. Their melancholy is turning into a call.”

Chloé Peytermann captures human moments and connections in the form of enchanting ceramic figurines. These figures hint at humanity, but are never fully identifiable as man, animal, object, or something in between. Yet, they are embodiments of uniquely human emotions; moments of tenderness, doubt, strangeness, and promise become frozen in the firing of her beautiful enamel work. Often vaguely anthropomorphic, the figures are still, silent, and at times seemingly stuck, as if waiting for something, the zenith of the moment so whimsically captured.

 

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN graduated in 2006 with a diploma in ceramic design. Chloé Peytermann’s work is exhibited in many galleries in France, Switzerland and Belgium. Her work is also part of the permanent collection of the Swiss Museum of Ceramics and Glass in Geneva and the Atelier de Kahla collection. In 2010, Chloé Peytermann won the Kahla Kreativ competition. She has presented her work in many contemporary ceramic fairs internationally, notably in South Corea. Chloé Peytermann lives and works in Dieulefit, France.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

Artist Kim Simonsson Exhibition @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Grower"

Kim Simonsson: Grower

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

April 26 – June 2, 2024

Kim Simonsson’s (b. 1974) latest exhibition returns to the golden age of ceramic art at the turn of the 19th century, when a radical transformation in the French ceramic industry saw pottery recognized as an autonomous art form. Ceramicists began celebrating the simplicity and sincerity of their medium following the tenets of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements sweeping Europe. The same visual language can also be seen in Kim Simonsson's new works.

Arriving in Galerie Forsblom’s main exhibition space is like stepping into a sculpture gallery of yesteryear. The colossal centerpiece is the imposing Waking Dream sculpture. Scale is a theme that has preoccupied Kim Simonsson for some years now, and his latest pieces are striking in their vast variations in size. By playing with different scales, Kim Simonsson poses the question: how do dimensions affect the essence of the sculpture? The larger-than-life-size adds special resonance to his giant sculptures of children’s building blocks. Kim Simonsson created the oversized blocks during the pandemic when he spent extended periods at home looking after his young twins, prompting him to wonder: who ultimately parents and raises us? Oversized dimensions similarly dialed up the impact of Kim Simonsson’s signature Moss People presented at France's 2022 Lille3000 Utopia Festival. The giant, 4.5-meter-tall moss figures were a striking spectacle lining the streets of the downtown. This summer, the same mossy giants will invade the center of Helsinki, taking over the courtyard of Amos Rex.

Kim Simonsson graduated with a major in ceramics from the University of Arts and Design in 2000. Today, he is an internationally noted artist found in international and Finnish museums, including the Victoria and Albert, the Museum of Contemporary Kiasma Art, and the EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art. Ten of his 4.5-meter moss figures were displayed prominently as a townscape installation at the Lille3000 Utopia Festival, and he also contributed an installation of 28 Moss People to the 16th Lyon Biennale in 2022.

Other post about the artist on Wanafoto:

Kim Simonsson, Little Prince And Moss People @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki, 2016

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki 

www.galerieforsblom.com

Sterling Ruby @ Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels - "DROWSE MURMURS" Exhibition

Sterling Ruby 

DROWSE MURMURS 

Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels 

Through 16 December 2023 

DROWSE MURMURS is Sterling Ruby’s most comprehensive exhibition with the gallery to date. Featuring four distinct bodies of new work—drawings, sculptures, paintings and ceramics—it provides a broad overview of the latest developments in his oeuvre. The presentation not only highlights the sweeping nature of his practice but also its material and thematic complexity. The contrasts that have shaped Ruby’s life—between his European roots and American upbringing, between rural Pennsylvania and urban Los Angeles, and between his father’s work for the military and his parents’ involvement with the hippie subculture—all serve as a catalyst for works in which the personal and political coincide. The title is borrowed from Allen Ginsberg’s poem Drowse Murmurs (1965) that echoes some of the most prescient themes of the exhibition, most notably the dialectic between war and peace, destruction and beauty.

Central to the exhibition are Sterling Ruby’s monochrome drawings, which he is showing for the first time. Executed in ink or graphite, they constitute an entirely new body of work. Raw and volatile energy fills each sheet in the same way Allen Ginsberg’s excoriating words hit the page. The Beat Poet coined the phrase ‘first thought, best thought’ to describe a type of truth-telling born from naked experience. Sterling Ruby’s stream-of-consciousness images, which also eschew artistic self-censorship, evoke explosions, cyclones, and nets. Yet fragile glimpses of nature can also be detected amidst their frantic lines, such as a spider’s web or flower.

Flowers also appear in the artist’s cast aluminium sculptures. The FP in the title stands for ‘Flower Power’, a slogan used in the 1960s and 70s to denote passive resistance to the Vietnam War. Ginsberg invented the phrase in 1965, the year in which he wrote Drowse Murmurs, and it served to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles. An iconic photograph of a man placing a carnation inside the barrel of an M14 rifle, taken by Bernie Boston in 1971, captures the ethos. This image also featured on a poster in the Ruby household. Sterling Ruby’s sculptures are permeated with the same uneasy tension. Their slender forms—which reference his earlier wooden reliefs—resemble gun shafts and bayonets. They are typical examples of the artist’s regenerative practice and cast from assemblages of wood and other materials. Ruby salvages scrap from his creative projects and endlessly repurposes it, meaning that old works give rise to new. The flowers and foliage, all gathered from around the artist’s home and studio, were cast from life. Through these sculptures, Sterling Ruby also introduces a modern material into his work: aluminium. Synonymous with the space age, it is now a ubiquitous part of everyday life, thanks to its lightness and strength. But it also has extensive military applications. The metal played a significant role in the Vietnam War, for example, when it was used to manufacture people carriers and bombs. With their skeletal, almost spectral appearance, Sterling Ruby’s sculptures stand on the threshold of past and present. By establishing an analogy between militarism and activism, the works also raise questions about the conflicts that define our own epoch.

Other aluminium sculptures are shaped like windmills, a structure symbolic of progress and sustenance. Historic examples still punctuate European landscapes as reminders of a bygone age. Different versions arose in the US: the distinctive water-pump windmills that allowed farmers to conquer America’s ‘breadbasket’, the Great Plains. Both are turbines, although the latter have all but disappeared from the American landscape. On another level, Sterling Ruby’s sculptures also speak to rich visual and literary traditions. From the windmills of Hobbema and Vermeer to those of Malevich and Mondrian, or from Don Quixote to Alfred Daudet’s Letters from My Windmill, this is a machine whose power reverberates down the ages.

Sterling Ruby’s latest TURBINE paintings also include windmill-like forms. They relate to his earlier WIDW series, which included a motif that resembled a window. The shape has now acquired a rotational axis and been set in motion. The transformation is open-ended: are these blasted out windows, propellers or wind turbines? Devoid of references to time or place, the cruciform structures carve the pictorial plane into quadrants. Bold colours, some menacing and others more hopeful, create an indeterminate and volatile visual field. Clouds, wind, fire, smoke, smog, storms and dust all spring to mind. If these are indeed wind turbines, then they are ambiguous emblems. Whilst promising clean and sustainable energy, they also bear witness to the ecological ramifications of turbine-driven industrialisation and war. Other paintings in the series contain coruscating bands of colour, which Ruby achieves by pounding pure pigment into the canvas. It creates the impression of speed and velocity, or explosions and bombs. Here, the collaged motifs are geometric shapes that suggest airplane fuselages, border fortifications such as dragon’s teeth, or nodding donkey oil pumps.

In his recent ceramics, Sterling Ruby continues his exploration of the four-petalled flower motif, or quatrefoil. This archetypal image has multiple spiritual and heraldic connotations, including an association with the four cardinal winds. Ruby has also made a visceral series of ‘flowers’ with lobe-like ‘petals’, and articulated stems that resemble vertebrae. With their gnarled and pockmarked surfaces, and their similarity to arrowheads, they resemble archaeological finds from a post-apocalyptic age. Lucio Fontana’s ceramic crucifixes, in which form and matter dissolve through the pressings and mouldings of the artist’s hands, were a reference point when making these works. Sterling Ruby has worked the clay just as intensely, pounding it in the open air so that it gathers traces, both positive and negative, of the world outside the studio. Like excavations or aerial views of ravaged landscapes, they follow on from the shattered topographies of the artist’s Basin Theology series.

DROWSE MURMURS features works that are not pictorial, figurative or didactic, but which still contain identifiable and thought-provoking elements that say something about the world right now. The formal and material contrasts, together with the slippages between past and present, build into a rich visual terrain that touches upon some of the most burning issues of the day. When Allen Ginsberg published Drowse Murmurs in 1967, it was part of his Planet News collection: a penetrating and an unflinching reportage on his life and times. Sterling Ruby channels that same spirit, anno 2023.

STERLING RUBY was born in 1972, holds American and Dutch citizenship, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Sterling Ruby’s sculpture DOUBLE CANDLE (2018) is installed permanently at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Exhibitions include DROPPA BLOCKA, Museum Dhondt- Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2013); STOVES, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris (2015); Belvedere, Vienna (2016); Ceramics, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2018, travelled to Museum of Arts and Design, New York); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019–20, travelled to Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston). In 2014 he participated in the Gwangju Biennale, Taipei Triennale, and Whitney Biennial.

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Lesley Vance, Ken Price @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "Fired and painted" Exhibition

Lesley Vance, Ken Price

Fired and painted

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

24 November 2023 — 3 February 2024

Fired and painted brings together a recent series of paintings by Lesley Vance (b. 1977) and a group of ceramic sculptures by Ken Price (1935-2012). Two American artists of different generations and disciplines but whose abstract works share a number of affinities. Taking scale as a departure point, Vance has pushed her practice in new directions for this exhibition, her fifth with the gallery. The presentation not only includes her largest canvas to date but also some of her smallest, together with an ensemble of medium-format paintings. Through the interplay of scales and volumes, Fired and painted suggests resonances between the different art forms and opens up a dialogue on the themes of colour, surface, form and spatiality.

Lesley Vance has long been fascinated by the relationship between ceramics and painting, both of which involve the application of fluid mediums onto neutral supports. Moreover, she also cites Ken Price as a key source of inspiration. A relentless innovator in the field of ceramic sculpture, Price is best known for his biomorphic forms that he finished, from the 1980s onwards, with acrylic paint instead of traditional glazes. Typically applying up to seventy layers of pigment and multiple colours to each work, he sanded these down to create striking, mottled effects. Colour is one of the key themes that links these two artists: both artists use its material qualities and allow it to determine their work in a physical and expressive sense.

Price and Vance also focus on reduction as a means of creation. Vance, who is interested in synergy and dissonance, often restricts her palette to a handful of shades in order to explore their full, tonal potential. In terms of composition, too, the act of removal is as important as the constructive process. She likens it to a form of ‘reverse collage’. Price, on the other hand, condensed a broad spectrum of colours into hues that read, from a distance, as a uniform colour value. He said: “Colour has been an integral part of most of the work I’ve made, but there’s not much to say about it. Colour is complete in itself. It doesn’t need any support from art, representation, language, or anything else. It’s hard to control... Colour conveys emotion, but you can’t really control that either.” Vance’s paintings, in which colour functions autonomously on both a structural and atmospheric level, echo this sentiment.

Both of the artists’ oeuvres revolve around movement. Price’s sculptures have a fluid, molten-like quality—as if a thick, viscous liquid has been stopped mid-pour. Vance’s paintings are dynamic compositions in which shapes and colours are indivisibly and inexplicably linked: they advance and recede, emerge and disappear, separate and converge. Price’s and Vance’s works are neither static nor lifeless. Both convey the idea of arrested movement in their art, as though motion has been temporarily suspended rather than permanently ended. And the roots of their practices, while abstract, ultimately lie in reality: Price found inspiration in the strange alien-like rock forms and ancient pottery of New Mexico, while an arrangement of objects, a glazed ceramic surface, or even another painting can all be catalysts for the gestures and shapes that determine the course of Vance’s paintings.

Price developed a highly personal approach to process and materials, and the same is true of Vance. His sculptures are flawlessly finished, inscrutable and luminous, and reveal nothing of the methodology behind their curious and otherworldly presence. The same sensibility is also found in Vance’s canvases, the surfaces of which are just as radiant and reticent. A mysterious quality surrounds both types of work: it is impossible to imagine the interior structure of a Price sculpture, just as the viewer will search in vain for a structural hierarchy in Vance’s paintings.

Finish is a crucial component of Price’s sculptures, which he described as “rounded forms with active surfaces.” Just as one might say of Vance’s paintings, in reverse, that they are “flat surfaces with active forms.” It is precisely this interaction—between colour, surface, form and spatiality—that links their work across disciplines and generations.

LESLEY VANCE (b. 1977, Milwaukee, WI, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Always circled whirling, her first solo institutional exhibition was recently organised by the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, USA (2023). Vance’s work is held in numerous public collections: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Her work is also currently included in 50 Paintings at Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee.

KEN PRICE (1935-2012) participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1979 and 1981. His first retrospective took place in 1992 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. A major travelling retrospective was organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012-2013) and designed by his friend Frank Gehry. His works are included in important public and private collections around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

XAVIER HUFKENS

44 rue Van Eyck, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com 

Elisa D'Arrigo @ Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NYC - Taking Shapes

Elisa D'Arrigo: Taking Shapes

Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York

September 9 - October 21, 2023 

Elisa D'Arrigo

Sidestepper 3, 2023

Glazed ceramic, 5.5 x 8 x 6 inches

© Elisa D'Arrigo, courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Photography: Adam Reich

The Elizabeth Harris Gallery presents Taking Shapes, an exhibition of new ceramic works by Elisa D'Arrigo. In this exhibition, the artist continues to explore possibilities for integrating color, mark-making, and animated sculptural form within the context of the glazed ceramic vessel.

Taking Shapes alludes to Elisa D'Arrigo process: each piece begins with an array of hollow hand-build cylindrical, spherical and rectilinear clay forms, taking shape as Elisa D'Arrigo manipulates these elemental forms in a period of intense improvisation. 

In the artist's words: 

"I play with these forms, combining, taking apart, recombining; all the while seeking a configuration that speaks to me, feels fresh and not fully known. Seams, edges and how the form sits, reclines, stands or even slouches ail get attention...the pieces are often taking a stance or in a paused position between moves. I feel the configurations in my own body, and their positions often record or express my own transitory states of mind. "

Elisa D'Arrigo (*1953) was born and raised in the Bronx, NY. In 1971 she attended CIDOC in Cuernavaca, Mexico; she received a BFA in Ceramics from SUNY New Paltz in 1975. She lives and works in New York City.

Elisa D'Arrigo: Taking Shapes

A catalogue with a text by Kay Whitney 

was published by Elizabeth Harris Gallery

ELIZABETH HARRIS GALLERY

529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.ehgallery.com

Liu Jianhua Exhibition @ Pace Gallery Seoul

Liu Jianhua 

Pace Gallery Seoul 

March 31 – April 29, 2023 

LIU JIANHUA

A Unified Core, 2018 

© Liu Jianhua

Pace presents an exhibition of sculptural installations by LIU JIANHUA at its arts complex in Seoul. The presentation focuses on Liu’s mastery of porcelain, a material he has been experimenting with since 1977, when he began working as an apprentice in the Jingdezhen Pottery and Porcelain Sculpture Factory—the oldest established center of ceramic production in China. Significant series form the artist’s oeuvre figure in the show in Seoul, including A Unified Core (2018); The Shape of Trace (2016–2022); Blank Paper (2009–2019) and Lines (2015–2019).

Through his works across sculpture and installation, Liu Jianhua explores themes of accumulation and impermanence, using ceramics, found objects, artifacts, and detritus as means to examine to Chinese history and culture. His longstanding engagement with porcelain can be understood as part of centuries-old craft traditions in China. Liu Jianhua also uses this material as marker of contemporary development within the context of globalization.

The bodies of works included in Pace’s exhibition underscore the artist’s increasingly philosophical approach to form and abstraction, which has characterized his practice in recent years. In 2008, the artist moved away from the sociopolitical themes that had previously informed his work, focusing instead on simple, pure forms to meditate on histories of visual culture in China. This approach has resulted in the sculpture series Blank Paper, in which thin sheets of white porcelain are hung on the wall, as well as the series Lines, for which the artist creates coiling ribbons of porcelain that intersect and collide at various points on the wall.

Liu Jianhua’s 2018 installation A Unified Core, also on view in the show in Seoul, comprises approximately 500 white teardrop- shaped pieces of porcelain suspended from the ceiling. As viewers walk around the work, they experience an immersive environment that encourages deep, serene contemplation.

Other highlights of the exhibition include the artist’s recent series The Shape of Trace, which serves as an investigation of various threads of human cultural development throughout history. Through its lyrical form, this porcelain work evokes the passage of time and the long arc of history. The material of this sculptural installation has great significance within the history of the artist’s own practice—as such, Liu Jianhua’s use of porcelain for the work aligns with its conceptual focus on evolution and progress.

Liu Jianhua participates in the 14th Gwangju Biennale in Korea, April 2023.

PACE GALERY SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Seyni Awa Camara, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Martin Disler, Bettina Pousttchi, Rosemarie Trockel, Masaomi Yasunaga @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin - Keramik

Keramik 

Seyni Awa Camara, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Martin Disler, Bettina Pousttchi, Rosemarie Trockel, Masaomi Yasunaga

Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

17 March — 22 April 2023

© Buchmann Galerie

With Keramik, the Buchmann Galerie presents an exhibition of ceramic sculptures by seven artists who have each made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary ceramic art: Seyni Awa Camara, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Martin Disler, Bettina Pousttchi, Rosemarie Trockel and Masaomi Yasunaga. 

Dating back to the Palaeolithic period around 24,000 BCE, ceramic art is one of the earliest forms of cultural expression. Ceramic materials have always been used for decorative and utilitarian purposes as well as for pure artistic expression, lending the medium an ambivalence that visual artists have so often found in their relationship to it. Too closely associated with craft and design for some, others have found ways to use ceramics and transform them into modes of free artistic expression. Both artists’ embrace of the ceramic arts and their rejection of it have happened in the context of the many artistic phases since 20th-century modernism. Today, ceramics are once again in focus despite the conclusiveness of the global digitization of our lived environment. Although they have found their way into aviation and medical technologies, the originality of ceramic materials and the archaic nature of their processing, which has not changed significantly since its inception, appears like a counter-image to an artificial world of pixels and algorithms.

Exhibitions such as The Flames at the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris in 2021 or Toucher Terre at the Fondation Villa Datris in 2022 have each engaged this wide range of ceramic referents. The exhibition Keramik at the Buchmann Galerie focuses on the work of artists whose ceramic experiments go beyond the materials’ utilitarian connotations, instead exploring the technical limits imposed by each substance and its application. Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to see ceramic sculptures from large-scale installations to smaller, more intimate works. 

Initiated as a child into traditional ceramic techniques by her mother, the practice of Seyni Awa Camara (b. 1945 in Bignona, Senegal) quickly moved away from the utilitarian to the artistic. Camara has evolved her own distinct and expressive form of sculpture in which she creates works that range in size from just over 40 centimetres to a more totemic scale of up to 180 centimetres tall. Modelled by hand, the sculptures are fired on a wooden pyre in the yard in front of the artist’s house, sometimes adding ore or treating the clay with putrefied tree pods to create a burnished finish on the surface of the terracotta. Camara’s figurative work is based on legends, observation, objects and landscapes as well as on her own personal experiences. 

The glazed sculpture In Camera by Tony Cragg (b. 1949 in Liverpool, UK) and the sandblasted white porcelain sculpture Silent Conversation – featuring two figurines of Chinese noblemen – explore the possibilities of form and texture with dissonant results. Protected by a thick metallic glaze, In Camera reminds one of some unknown piece of machinery whose function remains open. This invented form contrasts with the two found decorative porcelain figures of Silent Conversation and the perforated white surfaces that highlight the fragility of their material. A peculiar silence is inherent in this latter sculpture, which seems like a contrast to the strong rhythmical form of In Camera.  

The work Flat 59 by Richard Deacon (b. 1949 in Bangor, Wales, UK) is a large, flat rectangular plate of fired ceramic material, which leans against a stand like an unhung full-size mirror or large picture frame. The plate’s size and technical perfection is exceptional. Deacon combines the minimalist form with an expressive and painterly glaze of many colours, surrounded by a thin red glaze around the edges. This contrast accentuates the object’s invocation of boundaries and lines of demarcation. 

Martin Disler (1949, Seewen, Switzerland–1996, Geneva, Switzerland) has always evinced a fascination with ancient legends and myths. In Martin Disler’s works, the expression of life, love and death plays a central role, as is the case in this large terracotta vase. Drawings of skulls and faces were scratched into the wet clay and remain as traces of the artist’s hand, even after being fired. 

The sculptures of Bettina Pousttchi (b. 1971 in Mainz, Germany) often reference architecture and its social implications. Stemming from the artist’s interest in transforming functional objects, these works take inspiration from architectural cornice stones whilst utilizing a dense coloured glaze. In the use of prefabricated modules lies a conceptual connection to Minimal Art and a reference also to Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades.

Like much of her oeuvre, Rosemarie Trockel’s (b. 1952 in Schwerte, Germany) intricate and visually captivating ceramic works engage with themes of gender and identity. She plays with traditional forms and techniques – one sculpture is completely covered by black and white glazes while the other work remains unglazed – creating abstract shapes that challenge the viewer’s imagination. The evocative work entitled Kinderkrippe inspires an array of associations, displaying openly visible traces of the artist’s fingers that show the force and energy with which the material was modelled.

The inventive works by Masaomi Yasunaga (b. 1982 in Osaka Prefecture, Japan) challenge the presumed functionality of the materials used in ceramic art, thus advancing its sculptural directive. His most recent works cannot technically be categorized as ceramic, as there is no clay present in his finished forms. Unlike pottery, usually made of clay and finished with a glazed surface, Yasunaga sculpts glaze as the primary material of his objects that are pit-fired, buried in sand and combined with unique raw materials such as feldspar, glass and metal powders. The viscous glaze melts, collapses and aggregates with these materials, hardening to a stone-like consistency in the kiln. The resulting objects, mostly non-functional vessels, shells and empty containers, have the appearance of lost and found archaeological relics. 

BUCHMANN GALERIE

Charlottenstrasse 13, 10969 Berlin

www.buchmanngalerie.com