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 The forms and gestures found in her work derive from a wide variety of inspirations and art historical references, such as CoBrA, Situationism and Abstract Expressionism but also pop cultural aesthetics like graffiti or cartoon that indicate Ekblad's genre-crossing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, Bergen Kunsthall, 2010

Since the early 70's, Günther Förg (1952-2013) has been producing an extensive body of work, including experiments on abstraction and monochrome painting, against the general trend of figurative painting predominant in Germany in the 80's. Wall paintings, bronze sculptures, large format photographs, portraits or architectural views, as well as drawings and graphics witness the diversity of his approach. Universal concepts of form, mass, proportion, rhythm and structure constitute a common thread in his work. More recently, Günther Förg surprised with brighter and more gestural paintings, resulting from an intuitive approach to colour and composition, renewing again his artistic practice.

"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, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2012

Since the 1980's, Liz Larner (b. 1960) explores and extends the conditions and possibilities of sculpture. Her works are informed by the relationship between object, viewer and their surroundings as well as a deep interest in manifold materials and their particular qualities. Here, the artist puts a focus on the changes and symptoms of decay that certain materials undergo in the course of time. 
Larner discovered the material of ceramic for her artistic practice in the late 1990's. Fascinated by the autonomy of this ancient medium, the artist experiments with various compositions and forms. Especially the process of firing and glazing harbours a moment of unpredictability and chance that is significant for the final object and which adds an uncontrollable component to the work with ceramics.

„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.“

Russell Ferguson, Liz Larner Ceramics: An Introduction in Liz Larner, Aspen Art Museum/Karma, 2016

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) is a sculptor of more or less figurative, more or less expressive forms in clay, bronze and welded steel, and an orchestrator of fragments displayed often but not exclusively within wall-mounted vitrines. She works with an eye to extremes – monstrous excess, alarming paucity – creating a variety of objects that she describes as existing "somewhere on the continuum between pure fleshiness and pure cartoonishness". Hers is a restless, sometimes contradictory art, the result of sustained contemplation of the creative impulse and the mysterious potency of images and objects.

"This experimental, slapstick collision of Giacometti and Disney, literally cast or pressed into one physical body, leaves neither unharmed. In fact Warren's sculpture could be read as a response to culturally entrenched gender tropes - the slender modernist outline on one hand, and the Disneyish codification of cuteness and effervescence on the other hand - colliding in the real world, in real people's lives. Think of the late Amy Winehouse: big breast implants and anorexia. Warren does not merely make illustrative comments by pitting two things against each other, however. There is more at play. Sticking two things together that "don't fit" is just one possible method. Another is to duplicate (while twisting the logic of duplication); another, to alter proportion (elongate, squeeze etc.). And yet another is to use materials and conventions in unconventional ways. Think of Winehouse again: the postmodern mixture of visual styles and the clear modernism of Soul music."

Jörg Heiser, Bronze Heads and Hair Bows in Rebecca Warren, Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications, 2012