In the PROFILES section: 8 ceramic artists from USA, Germany, Slovenia, Netherlands, Portugal. Coverage of EXHIBITIONS and EVENTS in Italy, Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, Denmark, Portugal, South Africa, Brazil, Hungary, Switzerland, USA. In the section ARTIST JOURNAL, we present Ljubica Jocic Knezevic and Tomoko Konno. And we also have interviews with artists IN STUDIO as well as listings of Dates, Courses, Seminars and Markets.
NEWS
PROFILES
Syd Carpenter – USA
Henning von Gierke – Germany
Pottery Žuman – Slovenia
Hans Meeuwsen – Netherlands
Sofia Beça – Portugal
EXHIBITIONS / EVENTS
Venice Biennale 2024 – Venice – Italy
New White – Tegelen – Netherlands
Westerwald Prize 2024 – Höhr-Grenzhausen – Germany
Mare Modul Project – Adria – Croatia
Lucie Rie – Middelfart – Denmark
Firing Report / Susanne Lukács-Ringel – Mörsingen – Germany
AIC/IAC Congress – Alcobaça / Caldas da Rainha – Portugal
1st Clay Award – South Africa
TAKE 14 – Syke – Germany
Norma Grinberg – Curitiba – Brazil
NKS21/39/46 – Budapest – Hungary
Simone Leigh – Los Angeles – USA
Swiss Graduates – Switzerland
BOOKS
New literature
ARTIST JOURNAL
Ljubica Jocic Knezevic (Serbia) and Tomoko Konno(Japan) – Ting-Ju Shao
IN STUDIO
Hansueli Nydegger – Evelyne Schoenmann– Interview / Developing Skills
DATES / Exhibitions / Galleries / Museums
COURSES / SEMINARS / MARKETS
ADVERTISEMENTS
PREVIEW
Syd Carpenter studies African American farms and gardens and the forgotten legacy of African Americans as stewards of the land. With clay as her primary medium, her mantra and mission are to exert a positive reflection on her community through evocative elemental forms. Steel, glass and various found materials are combined with clay to illustrate her narratives. Importantly, her art exists to communicate with those who (in her words) “may otherwise disregard the extent, the history and presence of African Americans on the land has impacted their lives”.
Her metaphorical sculptures tell stories by selection and whimsical configuring of sampled forms. She is a repository of a specific kind of knowledge that is employed as visual art to tell stories of legacy and to resurrect the forgotten from obscurity. Carpenter calls her sculpted/assembled objects, “farm portraits”. Her “portraits” do not include representations of the human form.
In Indiana Hutson, she creates a landscaped bowl using sustaining eggs, architectural and structural elements, a fence, a shed, to create a symbolic portrait of the artist’s master gardener grandmother, Indiana Hutson. Her use of the pickling jar is also a potent and often repeated metaphorical device in African American culture. To “pickle” is to preserve. And within our cultural cosmology, preserving our erased or forgotten legacy is a kind of sustenance.
(Berrisford Boothe)
Syd Carpenter
The baby unicorn sits in Gierke’s studio and gazes at its oil-painted mirror image. The porcelain sculpture is a model for the painting Jungfrau und Einhorn (“Maiden and Unicorn“) – but at the same time is an autonomous work.
Centaurs, mermaids and dried snakes cavort next to the newly hatched mythical creature. The old wooden shelf is almost overflowing. Meditative music is playing in the background, and it smells of turpentine and varnish.
Tubes of paint are stacked next to mountains of brushes. On the walls hang realistic oil paintings of bodies, the play of light and shadow and supernatural creatures.
Skeletons, hybrid creatures and mythological figures from Egyptian, Greek and Germanic legends have always fascinated Gierke and have been reflected in his paintings since the 1970s. For around ten years, the Munich painter, stage designer and director has also been forming his mythical creatures in porcelain. “For me, it’s three-dimensional painting”, says the 75-year-old.
For him, sculptures and pictures go hand in hand and help him to express his visions: “They are created at the same time, but are different forms of expression.” Light and shade, youth and transience, vitality and decay – with the various forms of representation he can show the entirety of existence. In his exhibitions, the sculptures are then juxtaposed with his paintings.
(Laura May)
Henning von Gierke
Hans Meeuwsen works with porcelain. Ceramic artists working with porcelain have their reasons for choosing this material. For one, it is the sheer whiteness, for another the translucency, and the other for receptiveness of glaze colours.
Hans says it is “my material“.
Hans did not start out as a ceramist. He had thought of becoming a construction engineer, or an architect; but he ended up studying to become an art and craft teacher at the Academy for Beeldende Vorming in Tilburg.
At the Academy, he was mostly interested in painting, drawing and graphic art; he had little contact with clay.
So we can call him an autodidact within ceramics. He started in the early eighties with large slab-built constructions in stoneware. Later, in the mid-eighties, he learned to throw on the wheel and became a potter. After his stay in the EKWC in 1993 he started piling the thrown pieces on top of each other and constructing with them.
Hans is a constructivist. When later he couldn’t throw on the wheel, because of back problems, he started making work on the table top that could be stacked and constructed.
He had discovered the material porcelain, and he knew what he wanted to do with it.
His success with his ceramic work was immediate. In 1985 he was nominated for the prestigious Prix de Rome. He had exhibitions in Faenza (IT), Keramion (D), Fletcher Challenge (NZ). He attended artists’ residencies in Japan, Lithuania, New Zealand, and the EKWC in The Netherlands.
(Nesrin During)
Hans Meeuwsen
An interview with Monika Gass
I ’ve known your work for many years, have seen your wall panels, in different colours and shapes, last time in Portugal at the AIC/IAC Congress 2024. How did you start to work this way?
It was all unconscious. The next thing I knew, I was in the art world. I studied ceramics for three years at the Soares dos Reis Art School, but ceramics never really interested me because it was so closely linked to industry. I was interested in photography! At the university, I didn’t want to pursue sculpture because photography was calling out to me, but I ended up not going to any courses, photography was private and there was no money to pay for the course. So, I set up my studio at my parents’ house. When I took an intensive course in sculpture and ceramic murals with the sculptor Arcádio Blasco in Coimbra, I discovered another world, that clay is a material with which you can do almost everything. I did other specializations with Emilio Galassi, ES, spent time working with the master Arcadio Blasco and never stopped. I was hooked. I admit it, it’s my addiction.
Were you born as a creative person?
I never had any relatives connected to the arts, much less ceramics, so I didn‘t grow up in that world, and perhaps that’s why I never felt like I fit in with the so-called “normal” world.
Sofia Beca
The 60th Biennale Arte opened from 20 April to 24 November 2024, presented at the Giardini and the Arsenale, plus other places in Venice, curated and organized by Adriano Pedrosa. The international exhibition concentrated on two main titles, the Nucleo Contemporaneo and the Nucleo Storico.
The Biennale 2024 favoured artists who have never participated in the International Exhibition before. Special attention was given to outdoor projects, with performances and events during the pre-opening and closing weekend of the 60th Exhibition.
“Indigenous artists”, stated the curator, “had an emblematic presence.” Their work greeted the public in the Central Pavilion, where the Mahku collective from Brazil had painted a monumental mural and the Maataho collective from Aotearoa/New Zealand showed a large-scale installation.
The Nucleo Contemporaneo (A. Pedrosa) featured a special section in the Corderie, devoted to the Disobedience Archive, a project by Marco Scotini, who since 2005 has been developing a video archive focusing on the relationships between artistic practices and activism. On display digitally, with photos and documents, visitors were reminded how strongly protest has been controlled and politically punished and suppressed.
(Monika Gass)
Stan Bitters, Humpies, 2023, ceramic sculptures
A large number of works for the now fifteenth iteration of the Westerwald Prize started being uploaded on an online portal in October of 2023. The jury spent several weeks reviewing the 3192 images of all 1064 works by 627 anonymized entrants. Ninety works by 74 individuals were nominated in a first round of judging. Once they had been informed of their nomination, a caravan of couriers and shippers from all over Europe set out for the Keramikmuseum where the team unpacked works with utmost care, some pieces were professionally restored, crates were placed in storage and the works were installed in our largest, currently closed exhibition gallery.
In early June of 2024, the international jury travelled to Höhr-Grenzhausen and examined the artistry and craftsmanship of every single work over two days. As the chair of this round of judging, I would now like to summarize the jury’s observations and considerations in this report.
Remarkably, the entries for the New Talent Prize came from thirty-one different European educational institutions rather than primarily from Germany’s three most prominent ceramics programmes, as they normally do. It is gratifying to see that the clay as a material no longer triggers inhibitions among students. Respect for hierarchies when selecting art materials is totally foreign to them. Professorships in ceramics remain rare though, and their subject areas are being defined increasingly generally. All the same, many art schools have a ceramics studio. The job of teaching the material and maintaining ceramics networks has consequently shifted from the departments to the studios in many places.
(Nele Van Wieringen)
Beate Gatschelhofer, stummes lächeln einwärts, 2023
August 6th, Unexpected Gains in Abidjan
In the morning, I left Ghana, formerly known as the Gold Coast, and arrived in Côte d’ Ivoire, the erstwhile Ivory Coast, more than an hour flight. Originally, visiting Abidjan, the largest city in Côte d’Ivoire, was not on my itinerary. However, when booking a ticket from Accra to Cotonou, I learned that the plane would be flying westward to Abidjan with a 9-hour layover time before connecting to Cotonou. The 9-hour layover period provided a golden opportunity to explore pottery in a francophone country. I began preparing for a visa application, including proof of my hotel reservation.
When queuing at passport control of the airport, everyone took with them a vaccine certificate with a yellow cover. I also had a yellow notebook in my hand, but it was just a yellow fever vaccine exemption. The French-speaking customs inspectors didn’t give me any trouble, although it is possible that they simply didn’t understand the rough handwriting of an American doctor.
I might have been able to cross the border with an exemption note, but there was no way to opt out of encountering mosquitoes themselves. I covered myself thoroughly and applied mosquito repellent.
Unfortunately, the National Museum closes on Sundays. Unwilling to simply leave empty-handed, I asked the hotel’s front desk to help me call a taxi to the city centre for some sightseeing. The next day was the country’s Independence Day, and the streets were filled with vendors selling national paraphernalia. As the taxi passed a roundabout in the city centre, I saw a huge pot. Although this pot was made of cement, it still reflected the forms and traditions of the area.
(Guangzhen Zhou)
Euloge Ahanhanzo
Ljubica Jocic Knezevic – Serbia
The golden frames, with their carefully selected shapes, give the works resembling abstractions the appearance of paintings displayed in an orderly museum setting. The pressed clay emphasized texture and the striking black-and-white contrast. Framed in classic styles, these fired works consist of black-and-white abstractions of clay. Their visions are not random; they follow drafts of the same size, according to which the artist arranged and pressed the clay onto paper. The works are then placed into square or round golden frames of varying sizes, and hung on the wall either as standalone pieces or in groups. Ljubica Jocic-Knezevic’s (*1973) intention extends beyond merely highlighting the expressiveness of clay or the techniques involved, or creating paintings made from clay. She has a broader vision, in which materials, compositions, frames, and display interact with the history of contemporary art.
Tomoko Konno – Japan
Flowers are central to the work of the ceramic artist Tomoko Konno (born 1967), who excels in applying the lamination technique to skilfully create the rich and subtle forms and colours of nature.
Her earlier works characterized by graceful colours and shapes evoke enchanting gardens in early spring brimming with the joy of life. Combining various lamination techniques, the artist juxtaposed 0.1-0.3 cm clay filaments of diverse colours on the polished laminated surface. Konno’s recent works have further pushed the boundaries of her art. Their innovative forms are imbued with a new energy that translates her thoughts and emotions. In contrast to her earlier pieces reminiscent of elegant gardens in early spring, her recent works resemble flowers dancing in summer or the mysterious glades that invite viewers into vibrant landscapes filled with wild plants.
(Ting-Ju SHAO)
Ljubica Jocic Knezevic – Serbia
Tomoko Konno – Japan
Hansueli, you have a thoroughly sound training in ceramics. Was it always your dream job? And since you qualified, have you always wanted to work as a ceramist?
I discovered clay as a material early on, but didn’t really want to follow a career in that direction. For me, wood sculptor or wood turner were more of a goal, where I would have liked to have a job. Working with plants that still accompany me today would also have been a career goal, for example as a gardener. But then I did a trial week as a potter and was even more enthusiastic about it. Sometimes it’s a good idea to let something good mature, and that was also the case with the scary leap into self-employment. Some colleagues expressed their concerns as sales of ceramics were gradually slowing at the end of the 80s, and then it was becoming even more difficult to reach customers with such a time-consuming and expensive product. It was obviously not easy, but I still managed it step by step. Opening my own studio in 1996 was a good decision, it really showed me that there are still customers who have not lost their eye for “the genuine article”, handmade, although at that time the ceramics market was being flooded with very inexpensive mass products, including in the figurative sector. I was lucky enough to be able to show my exhibits to interested customers thanks to gallery and boutique owners who were not only profit-oriented.
(Evelyne Schoenmann)
Hansueli Nydegger
