la mia ceramica

Ida Ekblad’s (b. 1980) artistic practice incorporates painting, sculpture, performance, filmmaking as well as poetry. Her works transmit a distinct vibrancy and spontaneity, created through the energetic movement of her compositions, the bold application of colour and the attentive use of found materials. Ekblad's expressive paintings often depict winding and twisted lines, some indicate human-like figures, others resemble landscapes. The forms and gestures found in her work derive from a wide variety of inspirations and art historical references, such as CoBrA, Situationism and Abstract Expressionism but also pop cultural aesthetics like graffiti or cartoon that indicate Ekblad’s genre-crossing approach.

‘At the heart of this work is an energy, one that is palpably manifest in her finished images and objects. It is explicit in the manual strength required to construct one of her sculptures or to scramble up a scrapheap, yet also implicit in the movement, form and scale of her painting. Ekblad’s work is formed of contradiction; that of the social and the solitary, the physical and the contemplative. In Ekblad’s work, these similarities and differences are held in a delicate balance.’

Sarah McCrory, ‘Ida Ekblad’, in Ida Ekblad: Poem Percussion, exh. cat., Bergen: Bergen Kunsthalle, 2010, p. 27

Over a career spanning five decades, Günther Förg (1952–2013) developed a distinctive and prolific body of work, including experiments in abstraction and monochrome painting, against the general trend of figurative painting predominant in Germany in the 1980s. Wall paintings, sculptures, large format photographs, portraits and architectural views, as well as drawings and graphics, executed in a range of mediums, bear witness to the innovative diversity of the artist’s approach. Universal concepts of form, mass, proportion, rhythm and structure constitute a common thread in his work. From the late 2000s, Förg’s painting took a brighter and more gestural turn, resulting from an intuitive approach to colour and composition.  

‘Art, artists, architecture, landscapes, films and literature are all constant sources of inspiration for Günther Förg, and the notion that art is generally more likely to be derived from other art than from nature comes through in his various work cycles and series as well. His spontaneity of conception and dynamic gesture is contrasted with complex references and their associated meanings. Förg is concerned with self-reflecting experience and self-analysis in painting. By referring to the most diverse of artists from widely varying eras and styles of the 20th century, he brings out individual positions that were arguably of unparalleled relevance to artistic practice in subsequent decades, while at the same time he links periods and ideologies that were often mutually contradictory.’

Bernd Reiss, Günther Förg: Paintings, Walls, and Photographs in Günther Förg 1987–2011, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2012

Since the 1980s, Liz Larner (b. 1960) has been exploring and extending the conditions and possibilities of sculpture.  Employing materials ranging from the sculptural to the mundane, including ceramics, bronze, gauze, rubber, chain, leather and bacterial cultures amongst others, Larner’s works are informed by the relationship between object, viewer and their surroundings, exploring the manifold qualities of each medium. In the late 1990s, the artist started working with ceramics, experimenting with the firing and glazing process to create works harboured out of moments of unpredictability and chance. Recent works by Larner include wall-and floor-based pieces created out of single-use plastic components. By modifying their structure and use value, she reverses the process of decay and decomposition, transforming everyday waste materials into aesthetic form.

‘Liz Larner’s earliest sculptural objects resembled experiments that were on the edge of running out of control. Having begun by making photographs of unstable mixtures in Petri Dishes […] and recording their changes, Larner became more interested in the objects themselves rather than the photographs she was making of them. Gradually she became a sculptor rather than a photographer. She has always retained, however, an interest in the instability of form. […] There is part of almost everyone that prizes stability and predictability, but there is also something that revels in decay and decomposition, especially when it happens in a way that can be made visible – where the entropic meets the abject.’

R. Ferguson, ‘Liz Larner Ceramics: An Introduction’, Liz Larner, exh.cat., Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; New York, Karma, 2016, p. 5.

The way in which Navid Nuur (b. 1976) relates to material, the space around him and his observations therein, can almost be regarded as devout. The attention for detail and the careful fine-tuning of the various elements of a work or exhibition make the audience part of an ‘inner’ world. In Nuur’s work - although very conceptual at first sight - a very personal visual problem becomes the central question. What Nuur has in common with the conceptual artists from the sixties is the relation between concept and form. Form for him however, is not necessarily the result of the idea, but materializes through a subjective program of requirements or rules in which intuition has the upper hand. He applies concepts that often relate to a temporary in-between state that places his work between the audience and an often abstract phenomenon, such as light, energy, air, or ‘rest space’. Nuur’s form-language and meaning are therefore principally purely process-oriented.

Edmund de Waal’s (b. 1964) work addresses, among others, the subjects of collecting - archiving and including - removing. Recognised as an exceptional ceramist, Edmund de Waal models small unique vessels that form the base of his installations. Carefully composed vitrines create a visual narration and result in a subtle dialogue between tradition and modernity, minimalism and architecture, ideas of repetition and rhythm, informed by his passions for literature as well as music and suitable for meditative contemplation.

‘I work with things. […] And then I arrange them, find places to put them down, on shelves or within vitrines, in houses and galleries and museums, move them around so that they are in light or in shadow. They are installations, or groupings, or a kind of poetry. They have titles, a phrase or a line that helps them on their way in the world.’

— Edmund de Waal

Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) makes sculptures in a variety of materials including clay, bronze, steel and neon. The artist also creates collages and wall mounted vitrines using assemblages of objects she has collected. Warren says about her work that ‘it comes from a strange nowhere, then gradually something comes out into the light. There are impulses, half-seen shapes, things that might have stuck with you from decades ago, as well as more recently. It’s all stuff in the world going through you as a filter …’

‘To say that Rebecca Warren’s sculptures are always extremely tactile seems like an understatement. They offer themselves as hybrids between unwrought form, symbolic informe, and transmitter, an object triggering an entire chain of associations with lofty and lowly forerunners or reproductions, whether drawn from antiquity or from the artistic and non-artistic canons. Seething before our eyes is cultural primal matter, in which the hand of the artist at times seems to play simply the role of catalyst, while the elements fuse themselves together.’

Bice Curiger, ‘In all things a song lies sleeping’, in Rebecca Warren – Every Aspect of Bitch Magic, London: Fuel Publishing, 2012, p. 13