NEW CERAMICS

NEW CERAMICS T h e E u rop e a n C e ra m i c s M a g a z i n e

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Gallery Marianne Heller presents in cooperation with Yufuku Gallery, Tokio

“Mindscapes” Ken Mihara, Japan

12.Juli 13. September bis bis 1. November 16.August 2009 2009 Eröffnung : Sonntag, Sonntag, 13. September, 12.Juli 11.30 Uhr11.30 - 18 Uhr

18th October to 22th November 2015 Opening hours: Tue - Fr 11.00 - 13.00 & 14.30 - 18.00 Sat 11.00 - 18.00

Galerie Marianne Heller Tel.: + 49 (0) 6221-6190 90 2 www.galerie-heller.de Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage 2 www.galerie-heller.de Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage [email protected] Am Stadtgarten [email protected] Am Stadtgarten D-69117 Heidelberg D-69117 Heidelberg Tel: + 49 (0) 6221-6190 90

NEW CERAMICS CONTENTS 04

NEWS



PROFILES

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Richard Hirsch Lutz Könicke Martine Polisset Martin Buberg Jochen Rüth Margarete Daepp

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FORUM / EDUCATION Enlightenment: 3.0 – Gustav Weiß

5 / 2015 International

USA Germany France Germany Germany Switzerland

Art appreciation

EXHIBITIONS / EVENTS 35 UNICUM - IIIrd International Ceramics Biennale – Ljubljana 38 “The Dragon Dances”, Hetjens Museum – Düsseldorf 40 International Ceramics Symposia in Egypt 42 INTONATION – Deidesheim 44 Gold Coast Award – Gold Coast 46 7th International Biennal de Ceràmica – El Vendrell 48 Anniversary at Burg Giebichenstein – Halle an der Saale 51 “The Village” – Thomas Weber – Höhr-Grenzhausen 52 Parcours Céramique Carougeois – Carouge 54 “Edition 2015” – Staufen 56 59th Concorso Faenza – Faenza

COVER: RICHARD HIRSCH Crucible #5, 2009 Stoneware, woodfired low temperature engobes and glazes 107 x 38 x 38 cm

Germany Egypt Germany Australia Spain Germany Germany France

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Germany Italy

BOOKS

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DATES / Exhibitions / Galleries / Museums Exhibition diary

68 74 76

COURSES / SEMINARS / MARKETS International ADVERTISEMENTS International PREVIEW / IMPRINT Information

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Slowenia

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New books

IN STUDIO Marc Leuthold – Evelyne Schoenmann

Interview / Developing skills

International

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ABERYSTWYTH

5/2015

EDITOR'S NOTES

Dear Readers of NEW CERAMICS

T

he International Ceramics Festival in Aberystwyth is now already more than a month ago, but it was certainly worth being there, even if the journey is always rather arduous, not just because of the distance involved, over 1,000 km, half of it driving on the left. This time it was also because of the strike in Calais, which apart from one ferry route prevented all departures to Dover. The motorways, some even in Belgium, and then in France all the way to Calais, were closed and being used as a lorry park. I was therefore forced to make my way via country roads, and although I was not driving slowly, I arrived in Calais several hours late. But I was lucky and was able to get a ferry that docked in Dover before midnight. After midnight, the door of the bed and breakfast establishment where I usually spend the night in Dover would have been locked. The next day, I made the acquaintance of country roads and small towns south of London because here too the motorways leading west from Dover were closed and were being used to park lorries. I finally arrived in Aberystwyth in the evening and after a hearty welcome among old friends and acquaintances, three fascinating days at the Festival awaited me. On the opposite page you can see some of the first pictures, full coverage of the Festival is to follow in the next issue. As my work used to take me to the Philippines for several months almost every year during the 1990s, I was especially pleased to make the acquaintance of Rita Gudino at this year’s Festival. She is a professor of ceramics at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City and was in Aberystwyth with a fire sculpture in which she fired her “clay babies”. Rita promised me that in future we will receive information about ceramic events in that part of the world through her. No sooner was I at home again when planning got under way for the Oldenburg International Ceramics Fair. Since 2009, NEW CERAMICS has awarded a prize for outstanding achievements in the fields of the ceramic vessel, ceramic sculpture or ceramic painting here in Oldenburg. Initially it was worth EUR 1,000 and since 2013 the prize money has been increased to EUR 2,000 with the condition that the second one thousand euros should be used for an artist in residence programme. A solo exhibition at Oldenburg Castle the following year is also part of the prize. Possible locations for this residency are Sanbao in China (www.chinaclayart.com), the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, USA (www.theclaystudio.org), La Meridiana in Italy (www.keramik-kurse.com) and Guldagergaard in Denmark (www.ceramic.dk). The first prizewinner in 2013, Michael Cleff, could not take up a residency the following year for personal reasons. The prizewinner from 2014, Karima Duchamp from France, chose the Clay Studio in Philadelphia and spent May 2015 there. She was delighted by the conditions in Philadelphia and will soon be providing us with a report on what she experienced in the USA. This year, the judges selected Caroline Wachter from Werder-Glidow in Germany as the prizewinner. Now it is up to her to find the location that suits her best. We would like to take the opportunity to wish this year‘s prizewinner an interesting time, from which we are sure she will benefit greatly. Three days in Gmunden, Austria, now await me. After having sat out a number of years, NEW CERAMICS will once again have a stand at the market in Gmunden. This issue of NEW CERAMICS comes out parallel to the market. From Gmunden, it is not very far to Venice. Currently, the 56th international Venice Biennale 2015 is taking place (which is said to be very interesting and worth seeing!), and if you are in Venice, it is not much further to Faenza for the 59th Concorso di Faenza. You can find the report on the exhibition and the prize giving on page 56ff. of this issue. Whether I will be able to manage the journey like this has not yet been decided and this itinerary is of course only to be understood as a general recommendation. But there will certainly be a report on the Biennale 2015 in Venice in the near future. For now, I wish you a pleasant conclusion to the summer and a colourful autumn as I take my leave until November.

With Rita Gudino, Professor of ceramics at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, Philippines, with her LUAL Kiln during the Festival in Aberystwyth

Yours, Bernd Pfannkuche

On Friday 18 September 2015 at the Keramikmuseum Westerwald, Peter Callas, internationally renowned ceramist and wood firer from the USA, will be giving a talk at the invitation of NEW CERAMICS about his work and firing in an anagama. Admission is free of charge. If you would like to take part, please contact us ([email protected]) or the Museum ([email protected]) for the exact time of the talk, which had not been fixed at the time of going to press.

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

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DIE NEWS

INFO / EXHIBITIONS / PRIZES

The Carouge Ceramics Itinerary

offers a nine-day immersion in the world of ceramics. The 14th Parcours Céramique Carougeois unveils its new programme. In 25 years, this international biennial organised by the Bruckner Foundation, together with numerous partners, has succeeded in becoming a ‘must’ meeting for contemporary ceramics in Switzerland. From 19 to 27 September it will bring together more than 45 creators from twelve different countries for an artistic marathon of nine days in Carouge and Geneva. This year the theme of The Line has been chosen as the common thread of the displays. More details: see page 52 and under www.ceramique-bruckner.ch

A Circle Closes at the Gallery Rosemarie Jäger

On various occasions the Gallery Jäger has showcased the ceramists Beate Kuhn, Karl and Ursula Scheid, Magarete Schott and Gerald and Gotlind Weigel, also known as the London Group. Now a small retrospective of their works from the estate of Eva and Hansgeorg Gareis will be shown in the Kelterhaus. Over many decades the collectors Gareis maintained friendly relations with the ceramists of the London Group and assembled works mainly from the 1970s to 1990s. Thanks to their great commitment to ceramics the series of international exhibitions Form und Glasur at the Jahrhunderthalle of Hoechst AG had become possible. Eva Gareis was also well-known as visitor of the Gallery Jäger. In the Kabinett photos by Karl Scheid show his view of nature and ceramics – and how both can enrich each other. The circle closes with ceramic works by Sebastian Scheid who also takes care of the ceramic estate of Eva and Hansgeorg Gareis. The exhibition runs from 5–6 and 19 – 20 September 2015, Sat / Sun 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Galerie Rosemarie Jäger, Wintergasse 1365239 Hochheim, Germany www.rosemarie-jaeger.de The London-Gruppe 1988

International Chawan Expo 2015 in Hemiksen/BE

The 17th Chawan Expo is also the 10th anniversary of this exhibition of traditional Japanese teabowls initiated by Lou Smedts. 121 artists from 43 different countries will be participating in the anniversary event, which takes place from 12 – 20 September 2015 at St Bernardus Abbey in Hemiksem, Belgium. The exciting accompanying programme during the week of the exhibition is planned to include master classes and talks with artists. This year’s guest nation is Taiwan. Comprehensive coverage of the Chawan Expo will be included in the 1/2016 issue of New Ceramics. www.chawanexpo.com

GRASSIMESSE 2015 -

230 craftspeople, designers, colleges and artists’ cooperatives from eight European countries have applied to participate on the GRASSIMESSE at the GRASSI Museum of Applied Art in Leipzig, which takes place from 23 – 25 October 2015. A panel of expert judges has now selected 80 exhibitors. -Students and graduates from four German art schools will be presenting their work to the visitors along side well-known artists. Half of the exhibitors will be present at the fair for the first time, all of the others have appeared there at least once before. GRASSI Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Johannisplatz 5-11, 04103 Leipzig, Germany [email protected] I www.grassimesse.de

sART-up 2015 - Open house for the start of

term. The Institute of Ceramics and Glass Arts from the University of Koblenz is opening its doors for the beginning of the autumn term 2015/16, thereby heralding the start of the hot glass season. There will

Dong Hee Suh’s new work

Joy, Delight, and Happiness burst out of tragedy, sadness, and emptiness. In 1200 B.C., a woman, Ruth, a Moabite, became the great grandmother of King David. She is the centre of the ceramic sculpture exhibition. Her upper part is layered precisely with abundant volume. But the lower part is sharply cut and cracked delicately. It seems her body and soul have suffered from the pains of loss of family and childlessness. Now a new family, Boaz and Obed, give her abundant joy, delight, and happiness. Being faithful to family and to God in her hardships, she is a role model for women both in previous times and today. The light greenish white porcelain work is highlighted, contrasting with the background of black mat formax. Dong Hee Suh, director of the gallery, has presented Biblical ceramic art installations since 1977, when she had her first solo show at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA. The exhibition lasted from 27 March to 31 August, 2015 at the Dong Hee Suh Ceramic Art Gallery, Seoul. C-3304 (the #StarCity, Jayang-dong) 262 Achasan-ro, Kwangjin-ku, Seoul, Korea.

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be guided tours of the Institute and demonstrations at the hot glass kiln as well as raku firings with international participants. This year’s guests include lecturers and students from Burg Giebichenstein in Halle and the Rietvelt Academy in Amsterdam. stArt-up intends to bring glass and ceramics fans together in Höhr-Grenzhausen on the last weekend in September every year and to inform them of the development of the Institute of Ceramics and Glass Arts (IKKG). stART-up 2015, Saturday, 26 September 2015, 2-8 p.m. Institut für Künstlerische Keramik und Glas der Hochschule Koblenz, Rheinstraße 80, Höhr-Grenzhausen, Germany. Tel.: +49 (0) 26 24 / 9 10 66 -0 - [email protected]

NEW CERAMICS

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

EXHIBITIONS / EVENTS

DIE NEWS

“In the Dead of Night”- a mixed media installation by Malene Hartmann Rasmussen - Jerwood

Makers Open 2015. The wild land beyond the cultivated fields has captured our imagination for centuries. The forest is a social construction that simultaneously embraces the sinister darkness in which the savage and beastly thrive, on the other hand the supernatural, romantic, and nostalgic world of the fairytale. “In the Dead of Night” is a materialized daydream distilled from the mind and made by hand. Like shamanistic totem-animals, dark creatures emerge from the subconscious dark lake, to guide the way into the netherworld that lies beneath the oily surface. Malene Hartmann Rasmussen’s mixed-media ceramic installations draw upon motifs from the domestic and natural world. Memories, daydreams and childhood nostalgia are all called upon by the artist, who weaves them together into a fairytale of her own making. Rasmussen is interested in the human subconscious; she strives to create a hyper-real world that addresses this gap between perception and reality. For Jerwood Makers Open Rasmussen has created a large scale theatrical installation, an immersive and surreal ceramic forest. Utilising the idea of Trompe l’oeil, the technique of using realistic imagery to create an optical illusion, the artist has created lifesize, scenic trees by scaling up images of hand-crafted ceramic branches. Visitors are encouraged to venture through the woods to explore a fairytale-esque space of ceramic flora, fauna and intriguing narrative scenarios. The installation is touring the UK: 10 September to 3 October 2015 The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art - www.plymouthart.ac.uk - 28 November 2015 to 31 January 2016 Ruthin Crafts Centre www.ruthincraftcentre.org.uk – 26 March to 11 June 2016 Touchstones Rochdale www.link4life. Photo: Sylvain Deleu org Materials: ceramics, photographic print, wood, neon, perspex, rope. [email protected]

Ken Mihara – “Mindscapes”

Rebecca Maeder at Elfi Bohrer

This new group of works by Rebecca Maeder unites contrasts and lives from its aesthetic. The special surface is achieved by burning out organic material such as grains of rice during the firing process. Roughness and smoothness, light and shade, fullness and emptiness, all of these properties become visible through their opposites. Whilst studying for an M.A. in Korea, Rebecca Maeder’s new surroundings profoundly influenced her work, which can be seen in various groups of new works. Exhibition from 29 August – 4 October 2015. GALERIE FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST ELFI BOHRER - Burgwies 2 and Dorfstrasse 13, CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland Telephone +41 (44) 700 32 10 Kunst 15 Zürich- ABB Halle 550 Zürich-Oerlikon 29 October – 1 November 2015

- The work of Japanese ceramist Ken Mihara (*1958) is rooted in the traditional ceramics of his home country: as a pupil of Kenji Funaki – a student of Shoji Hamada’s and an outstanding Mingei potter – it would have seemed more natural for him to have joined in with the folk art ceramics of the Mingei movement. But Ken Mihara chose a different route: his ceramics – seemingly complex and simple in equal measure – stand between tradition and avant garde, between vessel and sculpture; with their stony surfaces of inimitably nuanced chromaticism they are reminiscent of the venerability of woodfired vessels in wabi sabi aesthetic and of minimalist modernist sculpture. With his latest group of work called kai/mindscape, now being shown at the Marianne Heller Gallery in Heidleberg, Ken Mihara has entirely abandoned the world of symmetrical form: subtly curved and folded, pointed forms thrusting upward combine stasis and motion – symbolic images of ceaselessly circling thoughts. The unique quality of his work, patiently developed over a long period and frequent winner of prizes in his home country, has reached a degree of maturity and perfection it is scarcely a surprise that leading museums like the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokio, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Victoria and Albert Museum in London now have his work in their collections. Exhibition in cooperation with Yufuku Gallery, Tokio, from 18 October – 22 November 2015. Galerie Marianne Heller, Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage 2, Im Stadtgarten, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany. Tel. +49 (0)6221-619090 [email protected] I www.galerie-heller.de

“Art du Feu”- Market for ceramics,

glass and metal in Gruyères, Switzerland. Just under 60 artists and artisans to exhibit their creations in this small mediaeval town on 17 and 18 October 2015. The venues will be both indoors at the two museums and Greyerz Castle, and in the open air. Leading artists will be exhibiting their work in the museums: At Greyerz Castle Monique Duplain, ceramist, at the HR Giger Museum, Nes, metal artist, at the Tibet Museum, Yann Oulevay, glass artist. Thomas Benirschke will be present with his magic potter’s wheel and Gaetan Rochoux will construct a paper kiln. 2nd Market for Ceramics, Glass and Metal: 17 and 18 October 2015, Saturday from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Further details from Tourismusbüro Gruyères, Rue du Bourg 1, 1663 Gruyères, Switzerland, www.la-gruyere.ch/artsdufeu

Biennale Révélations -

Fine Craft and Creation Fair Révélations. For the second time, the Biennale Révélations will be taking place at the Grand Palais in Paris. At this major fine craft fair more than 305 exhibitors from 15 countries will be showing their works from 10 – 13 September 2015. Craft worksers, artists, designers, gallerists, foundations, art schools… they will all be presenting the creativity that inspires them beneath the emblematic glass roof of the Grand Palais. This year Korea is guest of honour, and a Nordic craft pavilion has been curated by Marianne Zamecznik with work from Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The event was initiated by the arts and crafts organisation, Ateliers d’Art de France. The first edition of Révélations took place in 2013 and attracted 33,794 visitors.

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DIE NEWS

EVENTS / EXHIBITIONS / PRIZES

“Biofilm under Construction”

Commissioned by the F. E. McWilliam Gallery, “Biofilm Under Construction” is a new outdoor sculpture by Mark Revels, which fuses art and science. Inspired by virus structures, the sculpture sees the pioneering use of colour saturation by a triple underglaze technique. The work explores the worlds of the micro and the macro, in particular the miniature worlds of viruses and bacteria. From the micro to the macro, ‘Biofilm Under Construction’ explores and makes reference to societal infrastructures, encapsulating their cultures, traditions and customs, both locally and internationally. The piece questions, ‘Are we going Viral?’ Biofilm Under Construction appears to erupt and break through the paving stones within the F.E. Mc William Gallery Garden. It’s an interruption and invasion into what would have been a very ordered and landscaped part of the garden. It creates an obstacle to negotiate whilst also creating a feeling of uncertainty with its presence. It’s the constructed being reconstructed without permission or order. It’s an infection. F. E. Mc William Gallery Sculpture Garden, 200 Newry Rd, Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland, UK BT32 3NB. The exhibition opened on the 24 August 2015 and will remain on show as part of the permanent collection.

“Summer guests” - Ceramics and Glass from the Czech Republic - Exhibition at the Kasino Galerie,

Hohr-Grenzhausen. The journey of the Kasino Summer Guests started in Prague, went through Bohemia, along the Czech-German Porcelain Route into the Westerwald. The travel baggage of course contains nothing but porcelain and glass! The production of porcelain and glass has a long tradition in the Czech Republic. At the end of the Baroque era, Bohemian glass art was at its zenith and is still world famous today. It is similar with porcelain, in production there since the end of the 18th century, it became a symbol of fragile beauty. The new exhibition at the Kasino Gallery shows that this is still the case in the 21st century. The positions of Anna Polanská, Lada Semecká, Markéta Držmíšková, Lenka Sárová Malíská, Nela Trésková, Milan Pekar, Vladimir Groh & Yasuyo Nishida give a contemporary insight into the diversity and innovation of Czech porcelain and glass. Exhibition runs until 25 October 2015. Kultur-Kasino, Kasinostrasse 7, 56203 Höhr-Grenzhausen, Germany. www.kultur-kasino.de Opening hours: Tues - Fri 2 – 6 p.m., Sat 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Sundays and public holidays 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Hedwig Bollhagen Museum - The Hedwig

Bollhagen Museum is open! After years of planning, the Hedwig Bollhagen Museum has now opened in Velten, near Berlin. In the presence of leading politicians including Federal Minister of Education Frau Dr Johanna Wanka – herself a HB collector – the opening ceremony took place on 2 July. The Museum, funded by the European Regional Development Fund and local municipal and rural administrative authorities, is affiliated to the Velten Ofen- und Keramikmuseum. In a sensitively curated permanent exhibition of approx. 400 pieces from the artist‘s estate, it traces her life and work. She was born in Hanover in 1907 and died in Marwitz, the place where she had worked, in 2001. Ofen- und Keramik Museum/Hedwig Bollhagen Museum, Wilhelmstraße 32/33, 16727 Velten, Germany. Tel. 03304-31760 [email protected]

Karlsruhe Ceramics Fair

The Ceramics Market, set outside Karlsruhe Palace, attracted 3000 visitors. A stand of Burg Giebichenstein University of Art from Halle and another from the Forum Fabrika from Szeged were a forum for young ceramic artists. In the exhibition Glanzlichter (“Highlights”), visitors could gain a quick overview of the market and on Saturday, after the market had closed, many “night owls” took advantage of this opportunity until midnight. The EUR 3,000 prize, Keramik und Malerei (“Ceramics and Painting”) was shared equally between Jacques Czerviec from France and Christine Hitzblech from Karlsruhe. Marieke Ringel from Halle took the Emerging Artists prize.

photo: Thomas Naethe, Bendorf

“Homage to Gustav Klimt”

- Regina Heinz, who lives and works in London, is a ceramic artist who specialises in architectural ceramics for interior and exterior spaces. Inspired by water, her undulating wall-units add texture and a sculptural quality that animate each plane with rippling patterns of light and shadow. Her latest creation is a 2 mtr. wide wall sculpture from her Flow Collection, “Homage to Gustav Klimt”, commissioned as a bespoke artwork for the luxurious interior of a new residential development in London. The rich surfaces of Art Nouveau paintings were the starting-point for this hand painted composition of subtle brown and beige colours with gold accents, which sits well within the elegant living space. Regina’s next exhibition is at Decorex International 2015, Syon Park, London, September 20 to 23, 2015. www.decorex.com Ceramic Art Regina Heinz, Studio A208, Riverside Business Centre, Bendon Valley, London SW18 4UQ [email protected] www.ceramart.net T: +44-7779-167229

Vielschichtig Art ceramics by Petra Bittl From 13 Oct. – 21 Nov. 2015, Kunstverein Terra Rossa e.V., Leipzig, is showing ceramics by Petra Bittl in its gallery. The title Vielschichtig (“Multilayered”) refers both to the special surface treatment and to the diversity of forms and materials that are distinguishing features of Petra Bittl’s work – the intense combination of drawing and painting with the material clay is characteristic of all the pieces and forms the leitmotif for the exhibition. A course will be taking place parallel to the exhibition. www.terra-rossa-leipzig.de

Ortogeny: Ceramic Vessels by Sara Flynn -

Exhibition until 23 September 2015 Millennium Court Arts Centre presents Ontogeny, a solo exhibition of new ceramic vessels by Irish ceramicist Sara Flynn. Concentrating on the challenges of thrown porcelain Flynn produces sculptural vessels; manipulating and altering freshly thrown forms at varying stages of the drying process. Her work spans a range of colours and finishes, from complex blacks, warm and vibrant yellows to cool and subtle celadon greens and whites. Process and finish are integral to Flynn’s practice, coupled with constant exploration and a deepening understanding of form and volume. In essence, the work deals with a love for the process of throwing, an on-going relationship with porcelain and a fascination with the theme of the vessel. Millennium Court Arts Centre, Northern Ireland www.millenniumcourt.org [email protected] photo - Glenn Norwood

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COMPETITIONS / EVENTS

DIE NEWS

“Un Mestre à part!”-

The long career of Enric Mestre, with his rigorous, uncompromising approach, has been an outstanding artistic achievement. The artist has been the undisputed Spanish herald of geometrical abstraction in ceramics. His work is well known in Spain, not least through a comprehensive range of critical literature, whereas in France he is still little known outside specifically ceramic media. But his work is wide-ranging and contains many masterpieces created during his 35-year career. In this major solo exhibition, Galerie du Don shows a selection of sculptures from thematic areas the artist has worked on for years: his relationship to landscape, his pleasure in geometry and architecture, and from the theatre of the soul. Exhibition runs until 8 October 2015. www.galeriedudon.com

Fulle & Friends -

Exhibition in Rheinsberg brings together friends and companions. Since Karl Fulle moved to Rheinsberg in Brandenburg, he has presented a number of themed exhibitions with ceramics from colleagues who have crossed his path as an artist, who are his friends and whose work has inspired him. Shortly before his 65th birthday, he has assembled a high-class exhibition in the coach house of Rheinsberg Palace, placing work by 26 of these artists in relation to his own. The common factor is a passion for quality in idea, execution and presence. This exhibition will thus be showing latest unique, outstanding works by artists including Sigrid H.-Artes, Martin Möhwald, Antje Scharfe, Judith Püschel, Pit Arens, Ute Brade, Egon Wrobel, Heidi Manthey. Exhibition opens on 19 September, 4 p.m., Mühlenstr. 15 a, 16831 Rheinsberg, Germany and runs until 25 October 2015. www.fulle-keramik.de

Töpfermarkt in Frechen on 21

and 22 May 2016 – for over forty years a meeting place for the European ceramics elite. For many years, the Frechen Töpfermarkt has been in the highest league of Germany‘s ceramics markets. In May every year, over 130 ceramic artists and potters from Germany and many European countries have presented their work, offering for sale ornate functional wares and experimental work besides individual one-off pieces. Additional special activities will turn 21 ans 22 May into days of ceramic adventure for young and old. Application forms for participation at the Töpfermarkt can be downloaded from the internet at ww.keramion.de from October. Closing date for entries is 8 January 2016.

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

Tea and Leaves - the Art of Raku – Nani

Champy-Schott. Nani Champy would like to perceive nature, absorb it and become one with it when creating her bowls. She does not throw them but handbuilds because this process makes her feel directly in contact with the clay and with nature. What fascinates Nani Champy with raku is its spontaneity, its speed and its intensity. Her glazes are intended to crack, run off, crawl, shrink and fragment. She treasures what is generally held to be a glaze fault because this gives the bowls life and individuality. She says of her work that it is like a game played with great seriousness. Showcase exhibition at Keramikmuseum Staufen until 4 October 2015. www.keramikmuseum-staufen.de

Oldenburg International Ceramic Fair

- Once again, this display of top notch international ceramics attracted well over 60,000 visitors to Oldenburg in glorious sunshine this year. The Oldenburg international Ceramics Fair offered its customary impressive programme, which consisted of a ceramics market with outstanding exhibitors and a total of six prizes to be awarded, so that it was not only ceramics insiders who got their money’s worth. In addition, there were three exhibitions in the Baroque surroundings of the Landesmuseum in Oldenburg Castle, including the holder of last year’s NEW CERAMICS prize, Karima Duchamp. There were also workshops and a ceramic portrait with Marc Leuthold (USA) and Martin McWilliam. The exhibition brandneu – brand new in the Hall of the Landesmuseum awarded the Detlef Schmidt-Wilkens Prize for Ceramics in three categories: the prize in the category Function went to Hanno Leischke and Birgit Hasse from Dresden. The prize for the category Surface went to Lauriane Firoben from France and Rebecca Maeder from Switzerland took the pürize Left to right, sponsors, prizewinners and organisers: Hannelore for the category Innovation. The public’s prize for the Seifert, Marc Leuthold, Gudrun Schmidt-Esters, Martin McWilexhibition went to Carla de Vrijer from the Netherlands. liam, Karima Duchamp, Caroline Wachter, Rebecca Maeder, The competition for the annual cup edition from the Beate Anneken, Bernd Pfannkuche, Carla de Vrijer, Constanze Oldenburg Tourism and Marketing company, an award Schmidt-Wilkens, Silke Fennemann, Wolfgang Heppner, Birgit for functional ceramics, went to Barbara Hert-wig from Hasse, Axel von Besser, Hanno Leischke Berlin. The NEW CERAMICS PRIZE, including an artist’s residency grant and a solo exhibition next year in Oldenburg Landesmuseum for Art and Culture, was won by Caroline Wachter from Werder-Glindow. Further details on www.keramiktage.com or www.werkschule.de

“A visit to the studio”

- Dresden ceramist Ute Naue-Müller is opening her studio for all ceramics lovers for one day in the autumn, at a time of year when fire can again give us some comfort with its light and warmth. Guests are invited to watch the ceramist performing a raku firing or to sit cosily by the fire and look at her latest creations. Saturday, 31 October 2015 from 2 p.m.; garden and studio in Würzburger Straße 59a, 01187 Dresden, Germany - www.ute-naue-mueller.de

NEW CERAMICS

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PROFILE

The Search of

RICHARD HIRSCH A Legacy of Chance and Design Scott Meyer

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n September of 1978, Rick Hirsch set out for Japan. His proposal to the World Craft Council (WCC) had been accepted and he was travelling to Kyoto, home of the Raku family, there to demonstrate the process now widely known in the West as “American raku”. This would be a featured presentation at the Council’s conference. Behind him, the American Crafts movement was in full flower. The accessibility of higher education to middle class Americans in the 1960’s had fostered a new fascination with the diversity of world cultures, belief structures, and aesthetics, along with a strong desire to return to the earth. Objects made by hand and ordained by natural processes celebrated at once what seemed most human, personal, spiritual and potentially politically relevant. Within American raku, almost twenty years of experimentation, energy, and fermentation of thought had yielded not only a fresh set of firing techniques, but a mind-set at home in Abstract Expressionism as well as in the tenets of Eastern thought. Without question, this hybrid had galvanized Western ceramics. At the outset of his trip, there is no way Hirsch could have anticipated the character, quality, or weight of what was to transpire in Japan. At 32, he was no stranger to the clay art world. His studio work was already recognized and three years of research had yielded a book coauthored with Chris Tyler offering the first comprehensive overview on the subject of raku. After a rigorous study of the Japanese Tea Ceremony, Rick had always been careful to make clear distinctions between raku at its source and the disparate approaches it had spawned in the West. But as he arrived in

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RICHARD HIRSCH Kyoto that day, it was far from clear what, if anything, the Japanese thought of these developments. What an odd situation this must have presented for the Japanese to understand. Somehow, a sparse account of this traditional firing method had reached the States, bearing the name of one of their most famous ceramic families. By the end of the 1960s, still without its full cultural grounding, it had generally become a charismatic way to open process to chance, to extend creative options into the firing, and to realize unique aesthetic goals quickly. Settling as it did in academic environments in Southern California and spread by the great firing showman, Paul Soldner, it often reached its eager students as a dramatic performance, a “happening”, its merits partially resting on the experience itself. While there had been no comment made up to that point that even acknowledged the existence of “American raku”, it is fair to assume that certain Japanese were sceptical concerning this visit. It would not have been surprising if some were wary, perhaps even resentful. If so, these onerous feelings may have been magnified when, a short time before the conference,

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the Japanese aristocracy asked the Raku family whether they intended to demonstrate at the conference also. With the prince and princess of Japan planning to attend, the question might as well have been a command. The seclusion both family and process had enjoyed for centuries was about to be broken and made decisively public. Now instead of the stage being set, two stages were set for an event that held equal potential for celebration and confrontation. (From With Fire: "Richard Hirsch - A Life Between Chance and Design", RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press, Rochester, NY.)

Most compelling stories are typically brought to life by an inciting incident, the resolution of which is the substance of good theatre. While significant visual art is never assured by dramatic pivotal moments, often they are key ingredients that make art possible. opposite “Crucible #11”, low fire slips and glazes, raku patina, ferric chloride spray, 85 x 41 x 41 cm, 2010 below Altar Bowl with Ladle #2, low fired white glaze, raku rust and green patinas, 53 x 24 x 50 cm, 2002

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As Richard Hirsch arrived at the WCC summit in Kyoto, his was a uniquely prepared mind. As a young ceramic artist, he had already energetically engaged the westernized process called raku. In fact he had already broken new technical ground with post-firing fuming techniques, influenced by Tiffany strategies that extended creative options past the heat of the kiln. More importantly, rather than succumbing to the seductive nature of the process, exhaustive research ultimately brought him past the smoke and fire and delivered him to the heart of Raku at its source. Compiling material for the book, “Raku: Technique for Contemporary Potters”, which he coauthored with Chris Tyler, provided him with the vital historical and philosophical overlays necessary to reach past particular trends toward what is universal in the human endeavour. This was the artist who met Raku Kichizaemon XIV that week in Kyoto. These were, quite likely, the qualities of informed respect that ultimately moved the Master to share home, studio and legacy. It was an unprecedented gesture, its effects still being felt in Hirsch’s life, his art and the sensibilities of those he has taught in both West and East. With the above factors all providing his central access, it is helpful to know Hirsch’s mind as he moves forward to make the works that continue to define his career.

above Crucible Assembly, soda fired stoneware and slate, Hirsch, Meyer and Scotchie, 66 x 51 x 25 cm, 2012 right “Grounded”, hot blown glass, cast glass, slipcast ceramics, wheel-thrown ceramics, by Hirsch and Rogers, 58 x 25 x 25 cm, 2007 opposite “Mortar and Pestle #23”, ceramic with low fire slips and glazes, raku patinas, hot blown glass, 23 x 23 x 10 cm, 2006

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RICHARD HIRSCH Richard Hirsch has enjoyed a long teaching career, retiring this past spring as Professor Emeritus from the School for American Crafts at RIT, where he has taught ceramic art for nearly thirty years. His early scholarly and creative work associated with raku was of central importance to the American Craft Movement and forged a lively exchange between East and West that continues today. His work is celebrated throughout the world. Nationally, his works appear in important collections such as The Museum of Art and Design, NYC, The Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and The Mint Museum of Art, NC. Internationally, he is represented in collections including the Ohi Museum, Japan, the Icheon World Ceramic Center, Korea, the Taipei Country Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan and the Sorlandets Kunstmuseum, Norway. The works and writings of Richard Hirsch have appeared in all major ceramics journals globally and can be found in a wide variety of text books and surveys in the field. He is a permanent member of the International Ceramics Academy and continues a tireless international travel and exhibition schedule. RICHARD HIRSCH School for American Crafts - Ceramics Department College of Imaging Arts and Science Rochester Institute of Technology - 73 Lomb Memorial Drive, New York 14623 Phone: 585.475.7785 Fax: 585 475 6447 [email protected]

Though he is a tireless tinkerer with approaches to materials and processes, he abhors placing any method ahead of the works they should serve. He can and he will turn away from any approach (even raku process) that has become formulaic. His works may be understood as the consequences of search – benchmarks along his path. Probably owing to his early fascination with the traditional tea ceremony, conceptually he is drawn to the vessel and, consequently, to artefacts from human history that evidence a legacy of utility. He is an avid collector of objects whose age and wear transcend cultural specificity toward universal truth. His major series (tripods, weapons, mortar/pestle, and crucible) are presented with the reverence of religious icons ordained by the patina of use over time. Hirsch speaks with disdain of the clicheic “artist genius” whose successful works supposedly result from divine providence. His is a world of travel, study (art and human history, geology, technology, philosophy) and endless experimentation evidencing an amazing tolerance of “productive failure”. His advance is careful, steady, characterized by progressive insight rather than sudden revelation. The works selected here are evidence of this movement forward. Though the reference to artefact is strong, of equal importance is the reference to contemporary art (the fragile verticality of Giacometti, the graceful undulations of a Henry Moore form, the subtle juxtaposition of colour seen in Rothko and the powerfully hewn mass of Voulkos to offer a few examples).

Scott Meyer, PhD, is Professor of Ceramic Art at the University of Montevallo, AL. He earned his PhD in 1985 from The Pennsylvania State University. Art Dept. #6400, University of Montevallo Montevallo, AL 35115 USA [email protected]

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photos by Geoff Tesch

PROFILE

PROFILE

Lutz Könecke “Waiting for the God Vase”

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roßenrode near Göttingen in Lower Saxony. I enter Lutz Könecke’s studio. It is equipped in businesslike fashion, tools and implements, exhibition pieces and every day private possessions all laid out functionally. It is all about work in this room. Lutz Könecke seems to be a modest, independently minded person who maintains a sense of balance in his life. He is not concerned with order for order’s sake, but his the requirements are geared to the essentials. A decorative touch in the studio is a quote that faces the visitor when they enter the studio: “Waiting for the God Vase”; this is a saying that may be taken as characteristic of Lutz Köneck’s work: perfection has priority, successful pieces that should no longer be worked on. What has been taken to the highest level can not be elevated any further; otherwise there is a danger of destroying it. The dialectic of working artistically becomes visible here, he works towards a perfect result without hoping for divine intervention, but nevertheless, this quote is expressive of the hope of achieving a result that transcends the genius from the subconscious towards a quasi planned random result.

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Siegfried Stöbesand

above Tea and coffee pot, 2015 h 27 - 55 cm, stoneware thrown and assembled matt black glaze opposite page top Coffee pot, 2014, h 35 cm stoneware, thrown and assembled, matt black glaze opposite page bottom Vase, 2014, h 33 cm stoneware, thrown and assembled, unglazed

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LUTZ KÖNECKE

Lutz Könecke is animated by ceramic craftsmanship and working in art; as if to the manner born, he is one of the lucky ones who do not feel tradition and a legacy as a burden but as a maturing karma, with a charmingly modest sense of nonchalance. In his biography, several force lines related to ceramics manifest themselves: the famous Bauhaus potter Otto Lindig is his maternal great grandfather, and his craft background comes to him through his mother, with whom he shares a studio. On the paternal side, he has been influenced by his great aunt, Rosemarie Könecke, who trained in ceramics under Helma Klett. Lutz Könecke grew almost playfully into surroundings which allowed him to grow up with clay. Classic behaviourist theory proves itself in practice. Force lines that define life; seeds grow, not yet fully formed but always present. The eye is schooled, not ostentatiously aligned, almost certainly prepared unobtrusively for a later time without planned intent. His father was an inveterate collector of ceramics, both of them scoured flea markets; always in search of suitable finds, his aesthetic senses were sharpened here; a sense of taste was formed, judgements on proportion and colour are trained quite incidentally. As a conscientious objector, he worked for Göttingen department of conservation as an alternative to military service, thus becoming acquainted with actual remains in their historicity, gaining respect for them: arrow heads and shards from waste tips fired his imagination. He was holding the rudiments of human work from prehistoric times in his hands. His interest was there but his ultimate passion had not yet been awakened. He turned his attention to photography, took on a work placement with the established photographer Marc Theis. With him, Könecke learned basics that would accompany him later: schooling his perceptions: an eye for essentials was trained in connection with the necessary technical precision. He stayed

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PROFILE

PROFILE

left Vase, 2013, h 36 cm stoneware, thrown and assembled unglazed opposite page left Two vases, 2015, h 26 - 36 cm stoneware, thrown and assembled white and light blue glazes opposite page right Two vases, 2015, h 25 - 29 cm stoneware, thrown and assembled matt black and white glazes

with Marc Theis until 2000, but the urge to create something of his own was becoming ever stronger. He had never really lost his ceramic creativity from the focus of his life. All the signs pointing too a future in ceramics were too immediate. So he applied for a place at the Kunsthochschule in Kassel, and was accepted on the basis of his photographic work on light and shade. He started out under Professor Ralf Busz, and after his retirement, he found someone to further him in Professor Urs Lüthi. Lüthi provided him with positive feedback, which made him feel valued and made him unconditionally wish to continue working creatively. Besides his concern with craftsmanship and art, the presentation of his work became a defining constant. Urs Lüthi pointed the way: “Ceramists are at an advantage because they do not need to look for a meaning, there is already meaning in a vessel.” The question of meaning had been answered for Lutz Könecke; he had thus discovered his profession and his passion. The tradition of Walter Popp, who founded the Kassel School, found an adept eager to learn in Könecke. The centre of gravity of his work is on assembled vessels made of a number of individual elements. Forms are developed that

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could not have been thrown in one piece; precision and an aesthetic exploration of space in the relationship between inner and outer structures are what is important to him. The focus of his ceramics is on form, which expresses the essential more strongly. Complex forms are given a monochrome glaze or retain the colour of the bare clay; in simple forms, he makes the interplay of glaze colours shine out. His style: clear line, clear form, clear result. Without craftsmanship, without experience, without knowledge of technique, there would be no art. His workshop is his studio, always with the primacy of craft. Lutz Könecke’s work is impressive, the community of his fans is growing all the time. Especially abroad his work has been much appreciated; eighty percent of his work has gone to the USA and Canada. The 2014 Auguste Papendieck Prize was recognition of his evolution in art in the course of which his formal vocabulary has increasingly become his trademark. His ceramics have a high recognition value, they are at once art and craft. When I leave this workshop studio, I do it with the wonderful sense that in this location ceramics are being made quietly and modestly that continue the tradition of established masters of their craft, without having made clandestine borrowings from them; works that make their own mark without chasing after modernisms of taste typical of our times. What Exupéry said, that one could only see rightly with the heart, what was essential was invisible to the eye, is further enhanced by Lutz Könecke in his aesthetic endeavours to make the invisible visible. Siegfried Stöbesand, M.A. is a senior member of staff at a secondary school. He lives in Laatzen.

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TECHNIQUE Apart from drinking vessels and smaller vases, all of his vessels are made from two or more elements. Each element is wheel thrown. They are then dried until they are leather hard, turned and assembled with slip. They then rest for around a week under plastic sheeting before they are further refined. Then they dry in the workshop until all of the moisture has evaporated. In the first firing, in an electric kiln, crystalline water is driven off. After the bisque firing, the surface of the pots is sanded and then glazed. The vessels are fired in a gas kiln to 1280°C in reduction. The pots in brown clay are made in the same way except they are not glazed. They are fired in an electric kiln to 1140°C and treated with hard oil. This surface treatment makes them more resistant to stains and gives them a slight silky gloss. These pots are also waterproof and can be cleaned with a damp, lint free cloth. “The focus of my work is on the assembly of vessels from two or more components. In this way, forms grow that would not be possible if thrown in one piece. It is not about a highly complex form but more about working precisely with it. Working in this fashion offers me the opportunity to observe volume and tension in the body of the vessel and to test variations. “It is about the concentration on one form, about space and its aesthetic exploration, the relationship between interior and exterior – with the means of the ceramic vessel.”

LUTZ KÖNECKE Mörliehäuser Strasse 6 37186 Großenrode, Germany +49 (0)5503 - 999 068 www.lutzkoenecke.de [email protected]

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PROFILE

Lutz Könecke was born in Northeim in 1973. He trained as an electrician between 1991 and 1994. After community service in lieu of military service working for the department of urban conservation in Göttingen (1994-5), he attended a technical upper secondary school in Göttingen. After a further year in the conservation department in Göttingen he was an assistant to the photographer Marc Theis in Hanover between 1998 and 2000. From 2000 – 2005, he studied fine art at the Kunsthochschule in Kassel under Prof Ralf Busz (until 2004) and Prof Urs Lüthi. In 2007, he opened his own studio in Kassel, and in 20010 he relocated to Großenrode. Lutz Könecke has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since 2002. His work is present in various private and public collections.

PROFILE

MARTINE POLISSET A Taste for Forms

F

or 35 years the French ceramicist Martine Polisset has concentrated on revealing the beauty of natural forms. We met at her studio in Biot, a medieval village overlooking the Côte d’Azur. Martine Polisset’s studio is on a narrow street behind the church in the heart of the village, just a minute’s walk from the charming Place des Arcades where one of the last authentic Provençal restaurants of the village is to be found. Because times change and Biot is no longer what it was – a place full of indolent charm and a hangout where artists could savour the sweet life of the south of France – Martine sometimes says that she’ll leave. “But I have friends here, a nice house and a peaceful workshop. It’s not easy to leave a place that you’ve known all your life. My parents bought a plot to build on in the 50s; we came here for our summer holidays,” said Martine.

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Pascale Nobécourt

Martine grew up in Paris, her father was an architect and her mother a fashion designer. As she had always liked drawing, she first went to Atelier Met de Penninghen, an art school in Paris, for foundation courses before specialising in ceramics at the Ecole les Métiers d’Art in Paris where she met Claude Champy, Bernard Dejonghe and Jacques Buchholtz. After graduation from the Ecole les Métiers d’Art in 1968, Martine worked at a ceramic studio in St. Maur outside Paris and perfected her painted glaze technique. Settling in the south of France in 1970, Martine began to express her passion for the natural world through her first clay sculptures. Entering her workshop is like going into a deep vaulted cave. In fact it was formerly an ancient bakery; remnants of its original oven are still visible. Some of her early pieces are on display: oversized eggplants, zucchini and garlic bulbs with their dull enamel. Just in front of a big electric kiln is one of a series of her coral sculptures: a

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MARTINE POLISSET

opposite page “Théière Cœur” - 2007 - 28 x 21 cm, stoneware grogged clay above “Plissée Noire” - 2012 - 44 x 30 cm, stoneware grogged clay

tall standing branch glazed in bright yellow and mounted on a wood base. Another oversized coral variation glazed in brilliant red is positioned nearby; each abstraction in perfect balance. The small natural coral models, intensely studied for the series, are arranged on her desk beside a book about Anish Kapoor. Martine Polisset has always collected things, bits of wood or bark, stones, shells and seeds picked up on walks and then left in a corner of the studio waiting to be rediscovered with a fresh eye. In the centre of the studio is a table where she works using

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earthenware clay or, as in her recent pieces, a stoneware clay which she patiently builds up using the coiling technique. The artist has recently been interested in more abstract forms which she refines, interprets and transforms, either without a model, or starting from a simple concave base which allows her to develop several alternative variations. Her work takes on two parallel directions. On the one hand it borders on an austerity focusing on pure line – exploring voids in which sometimes a form repeats itself like an echo, evoking infinity. The other area explores the complexity of twisted and pleated forms playing on rhythm, and the shadows cast on their unglazed white or brown surfaces, as in one such piece inspired by the Vajra, a ritual symbol of Buddhist ceremonies. Because she likes the contrast of tone and texture, a smooth, glossy coating of bright colour is juxtaposed with an unglazed area

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above - “Hybride Brune” - 2011 - 65 x 36 cm, earthenware clay

“Plissée Rythme” - 2014 - 35 x 32 cm, paper clay

below - “Matrice Spirale Bleue” - 2010 - 18 x14 cm, grogged clay

photo by Jean-Jacques L’Heritier

photos by Jean-Jacques L’Heritier

of clay. Over time, Martine has abandoned the use of brilliant primary colours - sunny, exuberant hues suggestive of the South - for softer more nuanced tones which compliment her exploration of forms which are less literal and more conceptual. One of her latest series, the “Bifaces”, is inspired by Neolithic axe heads. Using formed paper clay while it is still moist, she applies a plastic film which has been painted with copper and iron oxides. When removed several minutes later, the film functions as a transfer, leaving a subtle patina of lines and marks suggestive of a long mineral evolution. In the group called Monolithe, made in collaboration with the glass artist Antoine Pierini for a recent exhibition in Biot, a grey piece in the centre of one sculpture evokes a granite pebble while in other works from Bifaces, black glaze intermingled with turquoise or jade green, is suggestive of precious stones. According to Martine, the purer the form the more perfect the contour has to be. She has a sculptor’s eye.

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PROFILE

ARTIST STATEMENT I am a ceramicist from Biot, France, who creates biomorphic sculptures. Found objects from nature are my inspiration and in reinterpreting these objects as concepts of new life forms, I try to capture the essence of life. My interest in organic forms began with a childhood curiosity for nature. I have always collected seeds, shells, fruit – those early observations laid the foundation for the direction my work would take later in my career. Each unique sculpture is formed using the coiling technique. The clays I use are: earthenware, stoneware and sometimes grogged bodies. Oxides or colour glazes are often added. Elements of line, contour and plane are very important to me. The profiles of my sculpture build tension, and at the same time achieve balance and harmony. In exploring styles of abstraction I like to play with dichotomies: emptiness and fullness, hollows and curves, matt and glossy. I use light, space and shape to give my work a rhythm like music.

Pascale Nobécourt is a journalist, specialising in contemporary ceramics, a regular contributor to the French magazine, La Revue de la céramique et du verre. She lives in Caderousse, France.

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Martine Polisset will be taking part in “Révélations”, Fine Craft and Creation Fair, at the Grand Palais in Paris September 10 - 13, 2015.

MARTINE POLISSET Sculpture Céramique 45 rue Sous-Barri 06410 Biot / France Tel: +33 (0)4 93 65 06 53 [email protected] I www.martinepolisset.com

Photo Keiko Courdy

“I look at a lot of profiles, planes, proportions, equilibrium. The form must not be weak,” Martine said. It is this same elegance of line which seizes her imagination in the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt whose remarkable vegetal fantasies are pinned on the wall of the studio. Even if it has become crowded with time, Martine is content with her studio lair, the refuge which houses all the ingredients for her creative alchemy. In the summer, when the heat fills all the streets in the village, it’s cool under the fourteenth century arched stone vault. If she wants to meet people she has only to raise the blinds at the door and curious tourists holidaying on the Côte d’Azur will find their way into the studio. Whenever she can, Martine takes off to work outside in the nearby garden of a friend. “I like to have this direct contact with nature. It brings out other things,” she said. Martine has lived well from her cheerful vegetable sculptures and especially from her pomegranates for which she once accepted a commission requesting 15 different stages of maturity: from closed fruit to ripe and rupturing with red grains. In another approach, she greatly enlarged the pomegranate as well as a fennel for an exhibition at Alain Ducasse’s Monaco restaurant (Martine’s bronze Kakis is part of Mr Ducasse’s collection). Some of Martine’s large-scale pieces inspired by nature vary in subject from a bean reinterpreted to become a tall totem to a sculpture of a stylized shrimp. She occasionally makes trophies or takes part in competitions such as one organized by the Vallauris Art Institute, for whom she made a very beautiful urn (which was shown at CkOMSA Gallery in Vallauris, June 27 – August 29, 2015). The common denominator of Martine’s creative approach is a sensibility for the natural forms, which when enlarged reveal their unseen beauty. The poet Paul Valéry, when moved by the beauty of a simple shell and wanting to forgo all scientific and intellectual explanations, found that he could only murmur: “Who then made this”?

PROFILE

MARTIN BURBERG “I take my hat off to my Neolithic colleagues” Ule Ewelt

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artin, you have been working as a ceramist for about 35 years now. How did your love of ceramics begin? Could you tell me about some of the most important stages of your career? I already knew that I wanted to be a potter when I was sixteen. I did work experience in my Easter holidays in a pottery that made Westerwald stoneware: three weeks of shovelling clay and unpacking the walk-in kiln when it was still 80°C – Sweaty, backbreaking work. But it didn't scare me off. My plans for my career became more concrete after I graduated from school during six months' work experience near La Borne in France. Back in Germany, I started an apprenticeship with Rolf Weber in Simmershausen near Kassel. I got a thorough training on the wheel there. It was more about quality and not quantity. After qualifying as a journeyman, I worked in various potteries. Six months in Sudan were especially important to me. One of the places I worked there

was a pottery that made ceramic inserts for small ovens. Conditions were very simple – the was no electricity in the potteries, for example. And in 1989, I qualified as a master craftsman. In 2006, you interrupted your life as a potter for several months in order to take part in an experimental archaeology project. That meant that with your own family and another family, you lived for several months in a Neolithic stilt house with exactly the same equipment in terms of clothing, tools, and supplies as the Stone Age family would have had 5,000 years ago. I know that this experiment was tough and rewarding for you in equal measure and that it influenced you profoundly. How did this period influence you in the way you see yourself as a potter? This experiment was a momentous experience. I have always been interested in prehistoric times and early history, especially in relation to ceramics, but since then I have been even more in-

MARTIN BURBERG

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opposite page top

Alb-Hegau, Singen

bottom

Rössen Culture, Halberstadt

top r.

composite pot with small additional pots, bisqued

bottom r.

first stage

terested in the beginnings of ceramics. I am fascinated by the balance of the forms and the beauty of the decoration. I often imagine what it must have been like when people discovered that soft, malleable clay turned rock hard in the fireplace and how the next step followed to make functional items from that. This feeling must have been overwhelming, I imagine. I am also interested by the question of when professional specialisation came about. As far as I know, archaeologists believe that this was only in the Bronze Age (from c. 2,200 BCE). But when I look at and replicate prehistoric ceramics, I can't help noticing that especially ornamental vessels and funerary objects are beautifully made and the decor has been thought out and executed in detail. This is why I can't believe that these ceramics were made on the side and by just anybody, as it were. I really have to take my hat off to my prehistoric colleagues. Martin, along side your everyday work, you also make prehistoric and protohistoric replicas for museums or private clients. Did you start with this during the Stone Age experiment? At that time, I thought up my own forms and decors. We bartered the results – pinch pots and necklaces, decorated and fired in the camp fire – at a local market in exchange for peas and lentils because our own harvest had been so poor. I began with the replicas shortly after the Stone Age experiment. The starting point was an encounter with a retired local farmer who collects ceramics and other artefacts in the fields and runs a small private museum. He had seen a documentary about the Stone Age experiment on the television and came to see me with drawings and fragments from a Stone Age vessel from the Rössen Culture (4,900 – 4,200 BCE). He wanted me to make a replica as a demonstration object for school classes and he was my first customer. Since then, I have worked for various other museums, for instance Wangen, Nidderau and Singen.

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What is the production process like? Do you just use the aids that were available to your Stone Age colleagues or do you use modern technology? No, I don't sit in the gloom in my stilt house, looking out over the pond, even if the idea does appeal to me. I have a perfectly

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PROFILE to

- black firing the composite pot

below

- stage four

opposite l. to r..

- original composite pot - replica of composite pot - bone tools - stage seven

normal pottery with electricity and a radio. I make use of contemporary inventions, and if I have not finished a piece in the evening, I wrap it in plastic. It wasn't easy to produce anything in the Stone Age experiment without a workshop or aids of any kind. Sometimes I was stretched to my limits. If possible, I throw the basic form of the replicas on the wheel in my studio because I simply can't ignore the financial aspects, and I don't wish to. Apart from that, I am mainly interested in the result and the character of a pot. I make sure that I don't make a replica, as a thrown form, look too perfect or technical. As a rule, the pots are burnished before I score the decor. I carve the tools to score the decor from wood or bone as I need them. I always try to imagine what the people must have felt back then when they were making the original. I take my time when I am making these pieces because I believe that you should make them as well as possible from the start. I bisque fire the finished pots in an electric kiln and then I black fire them in a bonfire. Sometimes I take the time to find raw clay. I know where there are old clay pits that haven't been used for around a hundred years. And not far from where I live, there is the old potters' village of Michelsberg where handmade roof tiles and tableware used to be made. What was the most interesting piece that you have replicated so far? Really speaking, every piece is unique and interesting. But one ritual object from the Hallstatt period (600 – 800 BCE) that was found in Nidderau stands out. It is a pot that is made of one large vessel and four small ones. The four small pots are linked to the main one on the inside with small holes. It is not clear what this funerary object was for. The mystery makes this piece really exciting, as does the perfect execution of the main vessel in contrast to the somewhat imprecise way the small ones are attached. The marks of the making, the lack of precision, the impressions of straw or something similar, it all tells a story. And there is another piece that appeals to me particularly: a small extra vessel from a grave in Edermünde in the north of the state of Hesse. It is from the Rössen Culture and is only about 5cm tall. It was closed with a plug of earth and lay on its side in the ground. There is a mark from dried-up liquid inside it, so it must have contained a liquid. Medicine, drugs, or gruel for the long journey to eternity? On the upper rim there are two holes positioned opposite each other. Was the vessel hung up from them or did they have to do with closing it?

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MARTIN BURBERG

PROFILE

Are your early vessels always replicas or do you sometimes work to your own designs? I sometimes make vessels in the style of early pots but that I have designed myself. I sell pieces like that in my shop but there is not much point in taking them to markets. I make my living by producing functional tableware. I do black firing or other low-temperature techniques like raku or pit firing because I am passionate about them. In my daily work, I miss working with fire directly. This is balanced by making replicas and the intensive study of prehistoric ceramics, which reminds me of the origins of the ceramics that my colleagues and I sell at markets today. Ule Ewelt is a ceramist. In her work, she studies ancient forms of representation. She lives and works in Grünberg-Stangenrod. www.keramik-uleewelt.de Martin Burberg spent six months in La Borne, France, on a work experience programme in 1979. 1980-83 apprenticeship under Rolf Weber in Simmershausen. 1986 six months work and study in Sudan. 1983-89 building up his own practice and working in various potteries. 1989 qualifies as master craftsman. Marin Burberg lives with his family in a large half-timbered farmhouse in Jesberg-Hundshausen between Kassel and Marbung. He has been freelance since 1984, first in Schwalmstedt, since 1991 in Hundshausen.

MARTIN BURBERG Am Graben 3 34632 Jesberg / Hundhausen, Germany Tel. +49 (0) 6695 - 488 [email protected] www.toepfereiburberg.de

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PROFILE

Transforming nature into culture – and back

Ceramic artist

JOCHEN RÜTH

F

rom his early youth, when he first shaped a malleable lump of clay in his hands, Jochen Rüth had fallen under the spell of this pliant material, fascinated by the plasticity of matter made of mineral dust and water, created in the prehuman history of geological processes, which has been nature as much as it has been culture during the blink-of-an-eye presence of humanity, a product of decay and decomposition, the natural result of processes lasting millions of years of inorganic weathering of volcanic rock, which, dissolved in water, flushed and blown

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Walter Lokau

away to become deposited in steadily swelling layers, ultimately to be dug by human hand, to be shaped into usable things, moulded into elaborate shapes, has been dried and fired as ceramic for millennia, solidified again to form vessels and figures, and, after stone and bone, the oldest material providing evidence of human technology and skill. Born in Würzburg in 1960, sculpture had been the artistic genre that he had had in mind but the obsessive autodidact had been unable to escape the draw of the potter's wheel, with which he

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JOCHEN RÜTH

PROFILE

had begun to experiment at the end of the seventies. However, he did not simply become a potter: he has always made pots, it is true, and he still makes them today – for preference powerfully thrown vases and bowls with milky, opaque, porous shino glaze, like a thick enamel clinging to the clay body, or raku teabowls, gratifyingly filling two hands, the glaze veined with its delicate blackened crackle. Yet Jochen Rüth, wilfully, stubbornly and quietly has remained an experimenter, a seeker for his own path and an inventive border-crosser, between vessel and a kind of sculpture that impresses through the observation of nature and culture, and is ceramic through and through, with which he has traced again in the microcosm of now the aeons-long span of the manifest material clay, perfecting it in his work. However, perfection in the sense of smooth, masterly immaculacy, has never been his aim. His true theme is neither vessel nor sculpture per se – his theme is what distinguishes both in entirely real terms: the transformation of the material itself: its transience. Jochen Rüth's works are abstract allegories of the impermanence of form, whether cultural of natural. In 1981, Jochen Rüth did a work placement with industrious painter and graphic artist Renate Rabien, who after graduating from the Kunstakademie in Munich discovered the ceramic vessel as a support for her painting and drawing. For the newcomer to ceramics, the sense of artistic freedom in her studio was an important experience: besides his routine work, he could pursue his own inclinations and follow up clues. Yet the feeling remained he was lacking the ceram-

opposite page “In Motion” - 2013 (2), h 24 cm w 34 cm, d 34 cm right top “Bizarre Vase” - 2012, h 18 cm, w 13 cm, d 4 cm right “In Motion” - 2014, h 16 cm w 28 cm, d 28 cm

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“Fusilli” - 2013, h 22 cm, w 45 cm, d 20 cm

ic basics. Herself not a thrower, rather someone who made pots turn before her, Rabien arranged for her avid pupil to move on to ceramist Constanze Hedrich, who also had a knack of teaching people to throw. Up to 1985, Rüth then worked with artist and ceramist Fritz Renner, where he not only became acquainted with an alternative life plan, also became familiar with the pyromaniac pleasures of experimental firing techniques. His relationship to the profession and to the potter's training remained divorced from official regulations and guilds: he was aiming for his own studio and the continuation of his experiments, which is why he felt that a proper apprenticeship would be too protracted and too school-like – in the mid-eighties, it was still the guilds that dictated the conditions and framework for working in the trades – as was the case in ceramics. He has thus been a freelance artist since 1986; after setting up a studio for the second time, Jochen Rüth has lived with his family in the Bavarian village of Altisheim near Donauwörth since 1995. In a Munich gallery, the young ceramic explorer discovered traditional Japanese ceramics, woodfired vessels with red fire marks, known as hidasuki, flame red deposits from straw soaked in brine – it was a revelation. It was an access point to an ancient world of ceramics that was new to him, driven not by the unconditional will to technical and formal mastery, but an alien aesthetic of deviation – a historic, evolved ceramic culture, fostered over the centuries, which esteems quasi-natural surfaces with firing marks, ash deposits and melted inclusions, traces of firing processes that intentionally evade complete control to create precisely the un-

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intentional aspects of elemental processes. This very different ceramic culture entranced Jochen Rüth, coinciding as it did with his personal feel for natural phenomena, for the disconcerting, generally disregarded “ugly” beauty of weathered rock, carved in weird shapes, polished, moss-covered, pebbles coated with creeping, dull-coloured lichens, cracked and crumbling bark, or for the saddening relics of human devices and buildings, made of stone, ceramic or iron, burred, creviced, rusty, often with surfaces of inimitable nuances, the closer you look the more there is to see. The studio of this experimental ceramist always has little gifts, found objects, flotsam and jetsam from near and far, testifying to his keen sense of the metamorphosis of matter, providing him with stimulus and inspiration. For years, for decades now, Jochen Rüth has been seeking ways of translating this into his ceramics. Yet no canon is sacred in his search, no technique is mandatory: where others have become dogmatic epigones of Japan and have sanctified the anagama woodburning kiln, he has remained pragmatically unorthodox. His results may have been mistaken for “classic" pieces, but in fact they owe their existence to his very own, repeatedly modified methods. His material aesthetic of transformation from nature into culture makes do without dogma or mystique – technique is merely a practical means to achieve the end he has intended. Thus he achieved his first “Japanese” surfaces with woodfired ash encrustations and marks of the flames, by firing thrown vessels in open saggars filled with straw – a procedure that was highly detrimental to the life expectancy of his kiln, now superseded by a

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JOCHEN RÜTH gas kiln that he built himself from old bricks in which his work is glazed and encrusted by a bed of wood shavings, coal and straw at a temperature of around 1300°C. No more mysterious is the preparation of the clay body, which after firing is heavily porous, honeycombed with interstices like lava: a fine grained mineral additive that melts in the firing makes it possible for this skin-scrapingly coarse clay thrown to form tree-trunk thick, spiral cylindrical vessels to ultimately resemble volcanic chimneys. Always inventive, the artist brutally enhances this appearance by shock-drying the surfaces of his massive forms with a gas burner until they crack open, and they are then penetrated by a wooden rod to hollow them, covering the whole body of the piece with deep crevices. Making tall, angular vessels is similar, with fragile, sharp bur, like flames turned to stone: the form and the surface evolve from a rectangular block of clay, where surface layers are repeatedly scraped off with a wooden lath until cracks once more appear – shock drying and driving in a wooden rod again finish the job. The forms that emerge from such a thoroughly violent process are neither predictable nor intentional: they have emerged without having been made, just as in the firing, the transformation of the material with an unrepeatable surface, finally hardens the material, making it a ceramic vessel-sculpture of a ruggedly natural appearance. Its sharp-edged beauty is as harsh as that of seething ravines and rocky gorges. That the element of the vessel is decreasing in Jochen Rüth's work and the tendency towards pure sculpture is increasing is demonstrated by his most recent work: thick slabs of clay, torn, twisted, contorted with a hard and powerful grip, look like studies of tectonic forces – bowl-like forms with encrusted, tumescent interiors seem like split-off pieces of a still-moving rocky floor. The convergence with nature has already gone far, but it is not yet at the end. Jochen Rüth's ceramics, themselves a product of culture, will continue to metamorphose, as if they were a piece of nature. Dr. Walter H. Lokau has a PhD in art history. He lives and works in Bremen as a freelance writer.

“Split Cylinder” - 2010, h 43 cm, d 25 cm

Jochen Rüth was born in Würzburg in 1960. From 1981 – 1985, he worked as a trainee in three studios in the Allgäu region. After community service, he set up a studio in the Altmühl Valley near the Solnhofen stone quarries. Six years later, he purchased and refurbished a disused joiner's shop in Altisheim, Bavaria. He has lived and worked here, with his wife and three daughters, since 1995. Work by Jochen Rüth can be found in public and private collections and in museums. His ceramics have won several prizes in Germany and abroad since 1990. A studio exhibition for the 20th anniversary of the studio in Altisheim will take place from 10 – 18 October 2015. More details on www.jochenrueth.de

JOCHEN RÜTH Willibaldstrasse 8 86687 Altisheim, Germany Tel. +49 (0) 9097 1814 [email protected]

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PROFILE

MARGARETA DAEPP Evelyne Schoenmann

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The Fascination of East & West

inear. This is the first word that occurred to me when I saw the winning piece by Margareta Daepp, Bosporus Set Hexagon, at Officine Saffi in Milan in the early summer of 2014. The play of function and design, emptiness and fullness, multipart structure and Middle Eastern colour is fascinating. Linear, but not only because of the precise

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lines. When I later met Margareta in person, I realised that she consistently pursues her fascination with East and West. This fascination may well have originated in her artist's residency in Shigaraki, Japan, in 2005. Firings typically happen there in an anagama (tunnel) kiln. This means that the ceramics are fired in direct contact with the flames, which lick around the

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MARGARETA DAEPP pots. Since round objects are particularly suited to this, Margareta has been working with the form of the cylinder since then. She certainly has the courage to set her own working methods against traditional Japanese ones, working with slipcast forms, which are untypical in Japan. She has remained faithful to this method. This residency in Shigaraki has led to the production of seven two-part vessels, the Lotus series. One part is lacquered. All of the vessels bear the names of Japanese flowers. Margareta Daepp was given an introduction to urushi, the art of lacquering, from a female master, also during her stay in Shigaraki. Back in Switzerland, the Lotus series was followed shortly afterwards by the Tokyo Line series. For this, Daepp transferred the colourful map of the Tokyo underground railway system onto porcelain by means of ceramic onglaze printing, coating the upper part of the vessels with automobile paint. These flawless vessels are also in two parts; they are named after the main underground railway lines such as Shinjunku, Ginza, Mita, etc. The traditional lacquer of the Lotus series and the ultramodern car paint for Tokyo Line form an interesting contrast. We can look forward to discovering the next series. Still under the influence of the East, Daepp then travelled to China in 2008, to Beijing, where she stayed at a hotel, a traditional building with a courtyard and a garden. It is situated in an old quarter. The typical network of old streets around the hotel, the so-called hutongs, was the inspiration for the next series of vessels, the Hutong series. The technique of ceramic printing and automobile paint is the same as a the Tokyo Line series. However, the Hutong vessels consist of three parts: at the bottom a white porcelain plate with incisions in the rim symbolising petals. The middle part is a bowl sprayed bright red with car paint. Red is the national colour of China. In the upper part, at first one sees a confusion of lines, but with a closer study of Daepp’s work, they turn out to be the hutongs themselves.

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opposite page “Tokio Line Ginza”, 2012, edition of 3 + 1 AP, porcelain, ceramic print, car paint Ø 28 cm, h 23 cm above “Lotus Series Hasu”, 2006, individual piece, anagama firing and Japanese lacquer, Ø 29 cm, h 25cm below “Bosporus_Set Pentagon”, 2012, edition of 7 + 2 AP, porcelain glazed

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PROFILE

It would actually be possible to take one of these pots and to find one’s way around the district like a map! In 2011, the collection, The Emperor’s Choice and The Empress’s Choice are added. These are porcelain cylinders measuring 3.5 cm in height (the Emperor 7.5 cm of course), with a white exterior and a gold interior for the Emperor, symbolising his golden robes, and for the Empress there are also the typical colours of the robes such as yellow and blue, green and pink and turquoise and red. Then in 2012, she travelled to Istanbul. And here too, East and West, which can be found in the series Bosporus. The vessels – and Margareta Daepp remains faithful to the principle of linearity – are cylindrical, consist of three parts and are cast in porcelain. The ornamentation induced the artist to make a further study of European and Arabic ceramic traditions. The vertical cobalt blue lines divide the vessels up into five, six or eight zones. Or in this series too there is a symbolic element like the vertical red rim of the bowl taking up the colour of the Izmir tulip. The Bosporus series: an ongoing search for the balance between two traditions. And then back to Japan. The exhibition at the gallery Ligne Treize in Carouge in Octo-

above “Oribe Ensemble”, 2013, individual pieces installation 2.70 m x 1.50 m left “Hutong Set light blue”, 2010, edition of 7 + 2 AP porcelain, ceramic print, car paint

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PROFILE ber 2014 showed Margareta Daepp with her latest fascination: Oribe. The Oribe style developed in the environs of Seto and Gifu, going back to the influence of samurai tea master Furuta Oribe (1544-1615) on the unique dynamic aesthetic in ceramics, painting, fashion and lacquer: geometric and floral patterns combined with strongly contrasting areas of colour. Based on the three basic forms of the circle, the square and the hexagon, Daepp has developed three series: she allocated porcelain as a material to the circle, the square to green Oribe and the hexagon to black Oribe. Each basic form is executed in a different technique, a different clay, a different glaze and a different colour. In addition, she developed the form of a geometric blossom and a second hexagon form. She had both made by urushi master Kei Nishimura in wood and urushi. Typical local sweets cast in sugar on seasonal themes gave Daepp the inspiration for a new series to complement her latest one: choosing the image of a plum blossom, she enlarged the imperfect form and completed her set with the silver-glazed form of the blossom. A fragmentary ensemble has been created consisting of six flat slabs in a very small edition that, with its typical materials, techniques and colours, references the rich culture of Seto and its ceramics. It is exciting to see how bravely and naturally the artist reacts to a difficult theme like East and West. We will be only too glad to accompany her on further trips to other traditions.

Evelyne Schoenmann is a ceramist. She lives and works in Basel, Switzerland and Liguria, Italy. www.schoenmann-ceramics.ch

MARGARETA DAEPP Jurastrasse 26 CH-3013 Bern, Switzerland Tel. +41 (0) 31 333 60 29 www.margaretadaepp.ch [email protected]

Margareta Daepp, born in 1959, lives and works in Bern and Geneva. After graduation from the School of Design in Bern, she continued her training under Setsuko Nagasawa at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Geneva and opened a studio in Bern in 1984. In 1989, relocation to Berlin. She studied as a guest at the University of the Arts in Berlin under Rebecca Horn and Isa Genzken. In 1993, invited to the European Ceramic Works Centre in ‘sHertogenbosch, NL, as artist in residence. From 1994-95, working visit in a studio in New York. Back in Bern she opened her current studio and in 1999 she was appointed lecturer in the ceramics department at the CFP Arts Appliqués in Geneva. Two further residencies in 2005 and 2013 took Daepp back to Japan. In the two centres, the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park and the International Ceramic & Glass Art Exchange Program in Seto, she immersed herself in traditional Japanese ceramics. Fascinated by Japanese aesthetics, Daepp wrote her MA thesis at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel, in the department of design and art, on "How does a simple, radical aesthetic develop?" She has been a member of the IAC since 2006. She has been awarded several prizes and scholarships for her work. Many of her pieces are in leading museum collections in Switzerland and abroad.

“Oribe Set”, 2013, wood with urushi lacquer and stoneware with black oribe-glaze, 75 x 40 cm, h 6 cm

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Enlightenment 3.0 The creative optimism that permeated the Enlightenment era shone its light in all areas of thought, research, production technologies and art as well as raising ceramics to new heights. Looking back into the past does not serve pure cognition but presses us towards the future, into the third Enlightenment, which we have already stumbled into.

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aining enlightenment is a natural human desire. In Classical Greece, Socrates, Plato and Aristotele embodied the first age of enlightenment; the second, which we really mean, lasted in the West from 1680 until 1830, and finally, UNESCO published its world report in 2005, Towards Knowledge Societies. This is the third attempt to make humanity see reason. In this third age of enlightenment, we are experiencing how the world is changing in such a way that no-one had been able to foresee. Let us take a moment to fully realise of how all this came about. The true story sounds like a crime mystery novel with the ups and downs of events. In between: the high points of the mind. These were also the high points for ceramics. And the future stands ready for us with its demands and encouragements. The word “enlightenment” also implies clarity and transparency. In the life of our society, there is scarcely a demand that is raised more often. It is the demand for truth. In Antiquity, the Presocratics, Socrates and his pupil Plato were a 150-year chain of truth seekers. The Greek mind was targeted to understanding the world, whereas Eastern philosophy examined the development of character. Remarkably, both golden ages occurred at the same time; the 150-year flowering of Chinese philosophy began with Buddha at the time of the Presocratics, followed by Confucius and Laozi, who lived at the time of Socrates and Plato. The Tao Te Ching is from the 4th century BCE and was the oldest piece of philosophical writing, whilst in their discourses the Greeks laid the foundation for the sciences that were to come. Very little has survived in written form. After the astronomy of prehistory and early history, it

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White ground vase painting from the time of Socrates. Aphrodite by the painter Lyandros 470/460 B.C.E.

was especially mathematics that they elevated to a new level, where is became a concretisation of knowledge. This period also produced vase painting, considered for centuries to be the zenith of ceramic art. In the time of the Presocratics, the archaic style was in vogue with its blackfigure painting, which, in Socrates time, turned into the severe style with painting on a white background. The High and Late Classical periods followed and the rich style of Plato's and Aristotle's times. The intellectual highlights also apply to all the other art forms: verse, anthems, theatre, temple construction and free-

Gustav Weiß

standing, monumental sculpture, which had begun its development in Presocratic times. The great sculptor. Polykleitos lived in Socrates' times. Every sculpture, whether in stone, wood or terracotta, was painted. This could be a clue for us. The painting and the partial gilding were not a mere embellishment but a major part of any sculpture. Pliny tells how the sculptor Praxiteles was asked which of his marble figures he thought were best, to which he answered, the ones that painter Nikias had had a hand in. This was how highly he esteemed the painter's work. This age, filled with intellectual achievement, was later described by European Enlightenment thinkers as the First Enlightenment. It ended in Hellenic times with Alexander's wars. Alexander destroyed Achaemenid culture and overran Asia Minor like one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse; on his whim, he had thousands of his prisoners crucified or rewarded*. Philip II had summoned Aristotle to Macedonia to educate his son. However, the boy was more interested in the heroes of the Trojan war and his mind was set on establishing his claim to the throne of Greece and Macedonia. He had his father murdered by a hired killer and instigated the massacre of six thousand Thebans*. In his campaigns against rivals for the throne, he demonstrated his military skill and became the undisputed leader of the army against the Persians. Alexander's wars lasted ten years. It is said that he consumed fifty crates of wine a month. In the eleventh year he drank himself to death with a huge goblet of wine. After him, nothing was of value any longer. Many towns survived named Alexandria (Plutarch says there were seventy), one was even called Bucephala

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in honour of his horse. Everything else ended in strife and murder. His entire kin, young and old, men and women, were murdered. The 150 years from the 6th to the 4th century were an intellectual event, but religion was untouched by it. There was actually no persecution of intellectual convictions. Nevertheless, Socrates was condemned to death for the “introduction of new divine beings”. The elders were suspicious of the new ideas that the young followed. And although the Delphic Oracle said that Socrates was the wisest of all men, he had to die for leading young people astray. His young admirers initiated fierce discussions after his death that ultimately led to his accusers being executed too. Socrates did not flee into exile, although that would easily have been possible. He became a martyr of the spirit. The knowledge that the Greeks had been first to stimulate in the world continued to develop to a higher level. Homer had laid the foundations for Humanism with the myth of humanised gods so that humanity could in its innermost soul feel related to the gods. Then came Jesus as the second martyr of the spirit. However, he did not preach reason but its opposite, intellectual poverty, for his kingdom was not of this world. The love that he meant was altruism, not empathy. This was educational and gave human existence a meaning to those who accepted this teaching. But it led to the darkest Middle Ages, which the Enlightenment wanted to counter by shedding light upon it. That was the problem. What preceded this “Enlightenment” was the final straw: the Thirty Years’ War followed the Reformation. Charles I of England was beheaded in London in 1649. There was a mass exodus of Huguenots from Catholic France, and they were pelted with stones on their way. I Prussia, they were allowed to practice their beliefs. The Hutterite Habans fled from Germany and Switzerland to eastern Europe, where they became famous with their faience, and under Turkish rule, they enjoyed certain privileges. Under stifling monarchical arrogance, things were seething everywhere. The age of the Enlightenment and revolutions had to come. By the middle of the 17th century, ideas and art were at an advanced stage.

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The enlightenment, on which the West proudly looks back, emerged as a force that wanted to understand and control the world. It reached its zenith in

Alexander dropped in. Like an apocalyptic rider, in 330-326 Alexander the Great subjugated the east of Persia in bloody wars. Gustav Weiß 2012, 25 x 27 x 9 cm.

Haban faience from Hungary from the time of the Turkish occupation. Michel Habel 1680.

philosophy, art and science in the 18th century. In all areas, scientific questions were broadened and placed on an authorial level like nowhere else in the world. The princes kept alchemists at their courts who were supposed to make gold and discover the perpetuum mobile but who actually expanded the world of knowledge with their experiments. In Florence, the Accademia del Cimento (the academy of experiment) was founded in 1675. In the field of the production of things, the alchemist Böttger succeeded for the first time with his invention of porcelain in replacing experience with experimental research. This technological masterpiece was followed by highlights in the art of porcelain which today, three hundred years later, are among the pieces most coveted by art collectors. We normally understand the term “Enlightenment” to refer to the intellectual movement that emerged in the eighteenth century and also lasted 150 years. It wanted to improve the world by rational thought and bring light into social conditions. It was only when it was beginning to wane in 1784 that Immanuel Kant published an essay in a periodical, the Berliner Monatsschrift, to answer the question of what the Enlightenment was. In it, he declared the Latin proverb, sapere aude the motto of the Enlightenment, by which he charges the reader to follow a programme of intellectual self-liberation, by means of reason. Daring to know in this way brought forth values that are still characteristic of Western civilisation: freedom of expression, the freedom to criticise, the priority of reason, equality, individualism, tolerance, democracy. The priority of reason found confirmation in the expansion of the sciences and is reflected in the constitution of the United States. But knowledge and reason – that cannot be all. In 1781, Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, where he contrasts reason with the fact that the senses are also a source of knowledge. This second enlightenment ended in the same way as the first, which seems to justify the claim that history repeats itself. The French Revolution, which was initially greeted as the first free and democratic rebellion of so many major intellectuals (Friedrich Schiller was even awarded an honorary citizenship by the French National Assembly in 1792), end-

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FORUM ed with executions, the Jacobite Terror, and finally with the Napoleonic Wars. What has happened in the two hundred years that have since passed for the historical necessity of a new enlightenment to become apparent? The oscillation between reason and soul has been interrupted by two World Wars, after which the desire for humanity and democracy came to the fore. The 21st century will not be able be a century of philosophers any more, like the eighteenth was, but needs to be broader in outlook. This means that the desire to know must promise benefits to many. Knowledge has now taken over a role in society. It is subject to conditions that had never existed before: 1. The binary system developed by Wilhelm Leibniz and others led to the invention of the computer and was the origin of the electronic age. 2. Evolution superseded the Bible as a history book. 3. Globality has superseded the slogan “Wir sind das Volk" with “We are the World”, bringing together calls for humanity and democracy. In 2005, UNESCO published its report entitled Towards a Knowledge Society. As a democratic, holistic new age, the knowledge society has superseded industrial society, corresponding to freely accessible information and communications technologies – the management of knowledge – and to knowledge machines as social constructions to answer questions. They are social because not only do they multiply knowledge but also the desire to know, which combats poverty. On the basis of Wikipedia and other sources of knowledge, Hermann Helbig in Düsseldorf has developed a search engine that he calls Sempria (like his company). With it, it is possible to simply ask questions, as if from one person to another, no matter how the question is formulated. In this way, knowledge machines are increasingly developing into communication machines. Alexandria, a “collaborative knowledge machine for the retrieval of semantically structured knowledge”, is being funded by the German Ministry of Science and Technology. A further knowledge machine (computational knowledge machine) is Wolfram Alpha by Stephen Wolfram. Werner Rammert has published a book, with others, on “Wissensmaschinen” (“Knowledge Machines” – Frankfurt am Main, Campus Verlag, 1998). The subtitle is “The social Construction of a Technical Medium”. In 2009, the visual

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knowledge machine vionto received the international Red Herring Award. The company vionto was founded in Berlin in late 2008 with the intention of taking up

Porcelain from the time of the Enlightenment; tureen from the 2,200-piece Swan service by Johann Joachim Kändler 1737 based on a painting in Dresden by Francesco Albani, Galatea in a Shell Chariot, 1635.

a leading role in the knowledge machine market. But as a system, art is completely differently structured to the system of science, which moves on and comes to a boundary it cannot cross. Scientific findings are something that can be collected, that has always been there but which has simply not yet been discovered. In contrast, the system of art is infinite, and it creates what has never existed before, but it also allows things to be discovered which have always been there but which are ineffable. In contrast to science, it can retrieve extra-linguistic phenomena with extra-linguistic means, and these phenomena have something like a soul. Ceramics must not be excluded from the knowledge society. As the art of the hand, which has hitherto continued the past as tradition, it is on the way to moving forward with its craft tools like human knowledge moving forward in the quest of greater knowledge. Over the past hundred years, ceramics has split into an artistic and an technical branch. Whereas the technical branch is based on “pure reason”, and has achieved a high level of excellence, the artistic branch, which is closer to craft, is subject to the freedom from criticism and doubt, duty and inclination. It is the power of judgement that determines the idea and the technology on the one hand and finding the general in the finished specific piece on the other. Philosophically speaking, this kind of ceramics fulfils Kant's demand for the unity of the senses and the intellect in his Critique of Pure Reason and even in his two other Critques. Freedom wants to become practical by finding complete expression in the world of the senses. Everything that is in the process of emerging is like a comet with its tail of exploding matter. It is not widely known that while he was a student, Immanuel Kant studied comets with growing enthusiasm. This led to his first major work, the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens. For the awakening of ceramics as a mediator between nature and freedom, the comet would be an appropriate symbol. *) C.Bradford Welles: “Die hellenistische Welt” in Golo Mann and Alfred Heuß: Propyläen Weltgeschichte Vol. 3. Berlin / Frankfurt a.M. / Vienna: Propyläen Verlag 1962. Pages 416, 405 and 408.

Towards Knowledge Societies. Nina Hole: The Bridges Advance, 2002. h. 83 cm.

www.gustav-weiss.de

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UNICUM - Ceramics Today III International Ceramic Triennale UNICUM 2015 Slovenia

Saša Rudolf, Zora Žbontar

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he International Ceramic Triennial UNICUM takes place in Slovenia every three years. A range of events presents contemporary art ceramics in Slovenia and the international world of art. The initiators of the triennial are the internationally reputed sculptor Dragica Cadež Lapajne, Mateja Kos, curator of ceramics, glass, paintings and sculptures at the National Museum of Slovenia, and Peter Vernik from the Association of the Slovene Fine Artists' Societies. This year’s Third International Ceramic Triennial UNICUM is organised by the National Museum of Slovenia in Ljubljana (the past two triennials were organised by the Association of the Slovene Fine Artists' Societies – ZDSLU). Under the motto Ceramics Today, UNICUM 2015 consists of a central competitive exhibition, an exhibition of art ceramics by students, and accompanying events across Slovenia. The central as well as the student exhibition are on display from 15 May till 30 September 2015 at the National Museum of Slovenia, Metelkova Street. The First International Ceramic Triennial UNICUM 2009 was held at the National Museum of Slovenia in Metelkova Street,

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Ljubljana. It consisted of an international competitive exhibition and an exhibition of ceramics made by students from art schools and academies. The main event was accompanied by exhibitions all over Slovenia. The Second International Ceramic Triennial UNICUM 2012 continued the concept of the first triennial and took place in Betnava Mansion, Maribor. The art ceramics for all three triennials were selected by an international professional jury, which also determined the awards and commendations. The jury for UNICUM 2015 consisted of five members: Bernd Pfannkuche (Germany), director of Neue Keramik/New Ceramics magazine, Valentina Savic, M.A. (Serbia), protop - View of the exhibition UNICUM – Ceramics Today III International Ceramic Triennial UNICUM 2015, Slovenia National Museum of Slovenia–Metelkova photo: Tomaž Lauko bellow - “Big Money” by Veljko Zejak (Serbia, Slovenia) installation, ceramics, graphics in clay, 90 x 200 x 0.5 cm

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EXHIBITION fessional ceramic artist, Nadja Zgonik, Ph.D. (Slovenia), chairwoman of the jury and associate professor of Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, Karel Plemenitaš (Slovenia), academic painter, specialized in graphic art and ceramics, and Insel Inal, Ph.D. (Turkey), professional ceramic artist, head of the Ceramic Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Kocaeli. The first triennial featured art ceramics by 76 authors from 28 countries, selected from a total of 133 submissions. The second triennial attracted 294 submissions and 62 artists from 25 countries were selected for the exhibition. This year we received 309 submissions from 52 countries and the jury selected 94 art ceramic pieces from 35 countries for the central exhibition UNICUM 2015. The members of jury awarded Veljko Zejak's (Serbia, Slovenia) Big Money with the Grand Prix UNICUM 2015. This work is part of a project The Art of the Margin, in which the artist worked in the two largest prisons in Slovenia – Dob and Ig. He taught the prisoners drawing and the printing on clay technique, and one of the prisoners also exhibited her drawings together with Zejak's Big Money. For the triennial UNICUM he installed a dollar bill in a light box, which highlighted the cracks in it. Stephanie Marie Roos (Germany) received the Honorary Award UNICUM 2015 for Games Without Frontiers. She commented on her work: “The theme of this group of figures is that of frontiers. Frontiers are a key problem to

people ... The pattern of behaviour, whether in politics or in a children’s game, remains the same." The Award Unicum 2015 was given to Tanja Lažetic (Slovenia) for Monument to the Unknown Heroes. Tanja Lažetic commented on her work with these words: “I got into the habit of cutting out newspaper photos of various groups of people who had found themselves in particularly exceptional circumstances. The people in the pictures represent events so out of the ordinary that they found their way into the papers. Although these same events in many instances profoundly impacted the lives of the people in the pictures, we never learn the people’s names." The Commendation Awards UNICUM 2015 went to Thomas Stollar (US & UK) for A Day in the Life, Roland Summer (Austria) for Vessel Object, and Lea Georg (Switzerland) for the work Sextet B_Y_G_V. The National Museum of Slovenia hosts the competitive part of the triennial, the exhibition White Gold. Porcelain from the Collection of the National Museum of Slovenia, and the international exhibition of ceram-

top - “Sextet B_Y_G_V” by Lea Georg (Switzerland), Recognition Award 2015; cast porcelain, transparent glazed interior 38 x 90 x 15 cm below - “Monument to the Unknown Heroes” by Tanja Lažetic (Slovenia), ceramics, print on ceramic plate, ten round plates, installation, 160 x 110 cm, 20 cm (each) Award UNICUM 2015 Photo: Dejan Habicht right - “A Day in the Life” by Thomas Stollar (USA & UK), porcelain, slab, silk screen, underglaze pencil, 250 x 100 x 2 cm Recognition Award 2015

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ics by students of Art Schools and Academies, chosen by invited mentors from the same countries as the members of the jury – Germany, Serbia, Slovenia, and Turkey. The following faculties and academies participate in the exhibition: Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle, Faculty of Fine Art, Ceramics Department, Sculpture (Mentors: Professor Martin Neubert, Assistant Professor Johannes Nagel), Faculty of Applied Arts, Belgrade Art University, Ceramics Department (Mentors: Assistant Professor Lana Tikveša and Professor Velimir Vukicevic), Faculty of Education, Maribor, Department of visual art education (Mentor: Professor Dragica Cadež Lapajne), Faculty of Education, Ljubljana, Department of visual art education (Mentors: Professors Mirko Bratuša, and Roman Makše), Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, Department of industrial and unique object design, Chair of unique object design – glass and ceramics (Mentors: Professors Dragica Cadež Lapajne and Tanja Pak), Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Kocaeli, Ceramics Department (Mentor: Professor Insel Inal). The triennial UNICUM presents ceramics as an individual artistic medium, equal to other, established forms of art. It encompasses traditional ceramics and pottery, as well as contemporary and unique modelling, achievements of reputed Slovenian and foreign artists, and enables a presentation of young creative artists. The triennial’s objective is to highlight new research in ceramics and encourage a deeper understanding of ceramics as part of contemporary creativity in the visual arts.

Saša Rudolf (1982) studied Archaeology at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and is currently a young researcher in the National museum of Slovenia. Zora Žbontar (1987) studied Art History and Sociology of Culture at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She is a student on doctoral level at the University of Ljubljana, the Department of Art History. She is working in the National Museum of Slovenia and is part of the Organizing Committee for the III. International Ceramic Triennial UNICUM 2015, Slovenia.

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top - “Games Without Frontiers” by Stephanie Marie Roos (Germany) - Honorary Award UNICUM 2015, stoneware, porcelain slip, oxide, hollow built, biscuit fired, 71 x 23 x 18 cm (boy standing), 37 x 23 x 35 cm, (squatting ), 39 x 24 x 28 cm (girl kneeling), 1 x 4 x 1 cm (street chalk modelled in ceramic) below - “Vessel Object” by Roland Summer (Austria), Recognition Award 2015 stoneware, clay, terra sigillata, handbuilt burnished, terra sigillata – raku, 42 x 36 x 36 cm

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EXHIBITION

THE DRAGON DANCES Porcelain from the Kangxi period and China Contemporary in Düsseldorf Antje Soléau

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he Hetjens-Museum in Düsseldorf is showing an exciting dialogue in porcelain in an exhibition running until 8 November 2015, a show dedicated to the cultural and economic exchanges between East and West that has been proceeding since the early Modern Age. Since Marco Polo's journeys in the 13th century, porcelain has been considered a prime collectible art and consumer item in the Western hemisphere which was thus highly prized by collectors. Various dynasties were actually in competition to see who could claim to have the finest and largest collection. This also lay behind the many attempts in Europe to reinvent porcelain or at least to discover the secret of its production. During the reign of the Chinese emperor Kangxi (1661-1722), what had hitherto been one-way traffic became a lively exchange between East and West. Kangxi not only invited Jesuit scholars to his court, he also rejuvenated porcelain production in Jingdezhen, which had been renowned as a major ceramics centre since the Han dynasty in the 5th century, not only for his own purposes but also for export. In the potteries that worked for the imperial court, around 60 – 100 people were employed. In the factories that produced for export, where a strict division of labour was the rule, there were several thousand, although a precise number is not known. Porcelain was purely a functional item for the Chinese of this period, but Europe’s ruling dynasties collected whatever the various East India companies brought into the country for their celebrate porcelain cabinets (e.g. in Dresden, Munich or Paris). And in general these pieces were merely porcelain items for daily use in the understanding of the Chinese. China had always exported functional porcelain to Southeast Asia, which submarine archaeology has repeatedly demonstrated to us beyond any doubt in recent

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left - Blue-and-white night light in the shape of a cat porcleain with onglaze decor, China Qing dynasty, Kangxi period (1662–1722) Jorge Welsh, London – Lisbon right - Teapot in the form of a mythical creature, porcelain with onglaze colours, China, Qing dynasty Kangxi period (1662–1722) Jorge Welsh, London - Lisbon

decades. Porcelain had also long been traded with the Middle East via the Silk Road. For this Islamic world, porcelain had been made to order after oriental models – usually chased or punchmarket brass or silver items. This is why in the Düsseldorf exhibition we find water pipes along side large bowls and platters. And this is also why it is no coincidence that the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul can boast one of the largest collections of Chinese porcelain. Since the reign of Emperor Kangxi, porcelain was also made for the European taste and designs. Not only heraldic plates eloquently provide evidence of this, the Hetjens exhibition also shows soup plates, bowls for women in childbed and a nine-pice set of knives with porcelain handles from the famille verte.

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DÜSSELDORF

left - Green dragon on a plate with a yellow background porcelain with yellow onglaze decoration, China, Qing dynasty; Kangxi period (1662–1722) - private collection right - Nine famille verte knives, metal with porcelain handles onglaze decor from the famille verte palette China – Qing dynasty, Kangxi period (1662-1722) on loan from Jorge Welsh, London – Lisbon

Whilst Chinese porcelain for the Chinese market was mainly restricted to monochrome glazes, especially favoured by scholars, figural and polychrome representations, mainly with onglaze decor, entered production in China (the widespread and popular blue-and-white decor current from the Tang dynasty was executed in underglaze brushwork). The colour pink (porcelain from the famille rose), which was previously unknown in China at that time, stems from the preferences Madame Pompadour, the mistress of the king of France. The colour yellow was reserved for the emperor and his closest entourage up to the end of imperial rule in China. What makes the “Porcelain from China” experience at the Hetjens Museum so exciting is the showcase exhibition, China Contemporary, running parallel to the Kangxi exhibition, which along side contemporary Chinese exhibits also shows reflections

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by German artists on China today. The first thing the visitor sees when ascending the stairs to the exhibition level is a large-scale photo by Andreas Gursky showing the interior of a contemporary temple to consumerism in Shanghai in brilliant golden yellow. In contrast, three black-and-white images by Katharina Sieverding that confront visitors leaving the exhibition with the darker side of contemporary China. The works of the Chinese artists reflect mainly upon new consumerist worlds: cars, televisions, crushed Coke tins, a worm-eaten apple in white, unglazed porcelain being eaten by ants in the famed blue-and-white decor. Lei Xue takes up the classic Chinese vase form and decorates it with a blue design on a white background, showing motifs from mass production, bearing the simple title of Business. The exhibition is under the patronage of Haiyang Feng, Consul General of the People’s Republic of China in Düsseldorf, Garrelt Duin, Minister for Economics, Energy, Industry and Commerce of the state of Northrhine-Westphalia, and Thomas Geisel, mayor of Düsseldorf, state capital of Northrhine-Westphalia. A catalogue for both exhibitions is to be published in September. Further details and information on the wide-ranging accompanying programme are available on www.duesseldorf.de/hetjens

Antje Soléau lives in Cologne. She writes for German and international arts and crafts periodicals as a freelance journalist.

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PROFILE

International Ceramic Symposia in Egypt Khaled Sirag

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nce I was announced to be the curator of The 12th International Ceramic Symposium in Egypt, I decided to draw a line between the last 11 rounds and the coming one. The first 8 rounds of it where all in a beautiful historical city Qina (60 km from Luxor) along with the 9th symposium held in Ashmoun Geris were all local, exploring the potentials of Egyptian ceramic artists together with the traditional ceramic potters, they all meet together in one or more than one regular pottery workshops, arising new creations and explorations to both of them, ceramic artists and traditional potters. The 10th Symposium (2009) was held in The Kharga Oasis (almost 600 km from Cairo) and I was asked to invite one foreign artist to participate. I invited Sirin Kocak from Turkey, and that was the first time for the symposium to have a foreigner in it. And then came Haytham Abdelhafeez as a new young manager of the symposium, which is a subsequent of The Higher Institute of Art Palaces in The Egyptian Ministry of Culture, and he was like the wind that changed many of rules, announcing new artists top - pottery workshop and wood kiln firing - the 11th ceramic symposium - Koum Oushim - Fayoum - photo - Khaled Sirag middle - a work by Inger Sodergren - the 12th symposium - Elminya - photo Osama Mohame below - Japanese artist Kurokawa Toru working during the 15th symposium - Dahab - photo Agnes Husz

as curators, and many new artists as participants, along with The 11th symposium that collected 5 foreign artists from 3 countries. Then was the 12th symposium, when I was a curator and invited 7 foreign artists from 7 different countries with only 5 Egyptians. It was the first one after the Egyptian Revolution, and the first one outside pottery workshops, and the first one that all artists fired their works themselves before the end of symposium (in the first 11 symposia the curator with one or more artists used to go back to the the pottery workshops for firing two weeks later, after the end of each symposium). That was like a new rule, because all the following symposia

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EGYPT

top - left- right -

SYMPOSIUM

work by Mohamed Farouk - 14th symposium - Dahab - photo Mohsen Gaber work by Agnes Husz - the 15th symposium - Dahab - photo Joao Carqueijeiro Agnes Husz receiving her certificate from the Egyptian Minister of Culture - the 15th Symposium - Dahab - photo Haytham Abdul Hafiz

fired all the pieces during the very short time of the symposium (maximum 10 days). The 13th symposium was at the Oasis again, but the last 2 symposiums were held in Dahab, that beautiful city by the Red Sea. The 14th with Ossama Emam as a curator started a new rule also, to make the exhibition of the final works in Cairo before the departure of the participants back to their countries. Then the last one, the 15th with Mohamed Abdel Hady as a curator. Following the evolution of the Egyptian Ceramic Symposium in the last few years may give an image of how it became like a life time wish to many ceramic artists around the world, who

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want to come and visit Egypt and touch its clay, even once in a life time. Also for the Egyptian artists it is like a wide gate to get in touch with great ceramic artists from all over the world and make beautiful, unforgettable memories with each of them. Artists like Rafa Perez, Inger Södergren, Palma Babos, Agnes Husz, Alberto Bustos, Kurokawa Toru, and many, many more were here, and more to come. Dr. Khaled Sirag - Lecturer at the Ceramics Department, Faculty of Applied Arts, Helwan University in Cairo www.facebook.com/Khaled.Sirag.Ceramics 002 0128 271 4646

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INTONATION - no. 11!

top - centre - below -

Artists participating in Intonation 2015 Installation of plates by Svein Narum (detail) Christoph Möllerwith a group of students in the cellar vaults

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othing has been decided. Nobody knows what is coming! The exhibition space, my studio and the former synagogue in Deidesheim have been cleared and a tense calm is in the air. It is arrivals day for the 11th edition of “Intonation – Deidesheim Kunsttage 2015”, a symposium for artists working in clay. Over the next ten days, seven of them will fill Galerie Friederike Zeit, the cellar vaults of the Schloss Deidesheim Restaurant and the former synagogue with life, spirit and art. Theodora Chofras comes from Greece, Joop Haring from the Netherlands, Svein Narum from Norway, Sunbim Lim is from Korea, Juan Orti is Spanish and Christoph Möller is German. The first hours are not easy for any of the participants. Nobody knows anyone and everyone must find their place, in every respect. A small family evolves. It is an intersting group, full of contradictions and opposing views. At the former synagogue, Theodora works with sculptures reminiscent of larvae, raku fired in warm shades of brown and grey, with a floral decor based on Mediterranean folk art. They lie on velvet cushions like precious jewellery. Juan has been inspired by silos and industrial architecture. His formal vocabulary could not be more purist. As a student of Maestre, he has internalised architecturally severe line. His white pieces, sometimes with a colour accent, are mainly wheel thrown, and his craftsmanship is incredibly impressive. Joop Haring, the third artist involved, is also involved with buildings. His sculptures are reminiscent of bird houses and towers. Rapunzel might let down her hair at any minute. The glazed, handbuilt stelae are up to one metre twenty in height. The light-flooded interior of the synagogue, the three artists‘ work, exchanging points of view, as it were, demand one‘s attention as soon as one comes in. The artists work silently at their places and there is a magical, spiritual atmosphere in this wonderful location. In my studio, there are three of us working together too. The atmosphere is completely different. A room full of things, lower, more crowded – a studio plain and simple. By the window to the garden, Svein Narum has settled in at his old kick wheel. His statement is to make everything for the table. Colours that appeal to the senses, warm, inviting the fingers to roam over his sculptural mugs. All made from earthenware and woodfired. Wonderfully old fashioned and also a response to the theoretical art of our times. Sunbim works in the middle, at 34 the youngest in the group. He has brought pieces with him, some of which are of impressive size. Made of small scraps of clay, with which he produces a characteristic texture, like a sandworm. He is in search of imperfect line, natural form. So it is not surprising that his work is reminiscent of pieces of rubble and weathered wood. In my own work, meandering calligraphy in space has evolved into architecture. More severe, with matt, multilayered engobes, sanded in places, looking like plaster. Futuristic constructions, “the future, already past”. Playing a game with time. The mood in the studio is often boisterous, which is not

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AUSSTELLUNG entirely unrelated to the exuberant presence of Sunbim. Christoph Möller has taken on a real challenge during the symposium. He has retreated into the vaulted cellar of the former manor house (the Schloss). A vast, cathedral-like room. Light filters into the vaults as if through embrasures. Christoph has decided to work without artificial light. The atmosphere is mystical, and depending on the angle of the light, the amorphous forms he builds change their appearance. Every time I go down to the cellar, something has moved. It seems to be an alien world of its own that you only discover if you take your time to adjust to the low level of light. During a symposium, artists show themselves from their most vulnerable side. They are subjected to their colleagues’ critical eye, and there are visitors every day, peering over our shoulders, asking questions, judging, and in the best cases, they are moved by what they have seen. As a maker, you are in a sense on the stage and you must put up with it. So it was all the more pleasant to work with this year’s group. The mood was attentive, interested, almost affectionate. Everyone had the chance to introduce themselves with their slideshow, and from time to time, guests came along to watch. And that is another important aspect: where would art be if no one saw it? Many collectors and visitors have been following Intonation for years. This event is supported by clay producers Goerg & Schneider – who have sponsored it with materials –, the local utility company, wine makers, restaurants and many other friends; its strength derives from a mixture of the highest level of professionalism, the charm of improvisation and informal hospitality. Suddenly, the day of departure has arrived. The past ten days feel as if they have been a long time because we have become so close. Then everything is empty again, the studio, the gallery and the synagogue. And I feel like parents must when their children have left home: rather lonely and with the strange sense that no one needs me any more.

Friederike Zeit lives and works in Germany and Norway. She is the founder, curator and organiser of the symposium Intonation, Deidesheimer Kunsttage www.intonation-deidesheim.de www.friederikezeit.de

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top l. - Theodora Chorafas top r. - Juan Orti centre - view of the exhibition; work in the foreground Sunbin Lim on the wall Joop Haring centre l. - Juan Orti and Sunbim Lim in conversation left - Joop Haring centre r. - view of the exhibition in the foreground work by Theodora Chorafas, in the background Juan Orti

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COMPETITION

29th Gold Coast International Ceramic Award 2014

Michaela Kloeckner

Michaela Kloeckner

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he Gold Coast International Ceramic Award is biennial and one of Australia’s biggest ceramic awards. It was established in 1982 to encourage the creation and appreciation of ceramics and became an international exhibition in 1995. This year’s competition attracted entries from Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Switzerland, Argentina and Israel. Artists' talks by the judge, Dr Patsy Hely, 2005 winner Merran Essan, and 2012 winner Leisa Russell preceded the opening function. Guest judge Dr Patsy Hely had the difficult task of selecting forty-five ceramics from 200 entries. Many of the selected ceramics exhibited this year were made by Australian ceramicists. Recently retired, Dr Patsy Hely, ceramic artist and academic, who convened the Honours and Graduate Coursework programs at ANU School of Art in Canberra, was herself a winner of the 1993 Gold Coast International Ceramic Award. This year she selected Thai-born Australian artist Vipoo Srivilasa’s work as winner of the 2014 29th Gold Coast International Ceramic Art Award. Two intricately handbuilt porcelain bulls, titled "Battle of Old and New Power" 2012, 19 x 20 x 30 cm (NEW CERAMICS, NEWS 6/14), became part of the extensive ceramic collection of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery, with the artist receiving 10,000 dollars for his winning entry. Patsy Hely noted in her opening night speech that Vipoo Srivilasa’s "Battle of Old and New Power", a narrative work showing two exquisitely made water buffalos, one marked red, the other yellow, circling each other, rendered in pristine white porcelain, it is a fine example of work where idea, material and technique coalesce. Srivilasa made the work in response to political upheavals taking place in Thailand over the last few years. “ At this particular moment in history though, it has a resonance not just with one

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country’s internal battles but with the pulls and pushes of global relations and power struggles more broadly. At once beautiful and unsettling, Srivilasa’s work speaks loudly of this moment in time.” Upon close observation the skills involved to make these two outstanding and intricate pieces using hundreds of delicate porcelain pedals are nothing short of amazing and seem to remind and extend upon Vipoo’s “Patience Flower” 2012 series, created while staying in Jingdezhen, China. The overall impression of the exhibition had a feeling of whiteness and lightness, with predominantly pristine and delicate looking works. Running the Gauntlet by Australian ceramicist Gabrielle Sturmann from Far North Queensland had a seemingly hidden, but very unique appeal. The fascination with the work did not derive from the theme of finely modelled Australian animals, like kangaroo, echidna, python, possum, scrub turkey and paddymelon, but from the process of using the bones of these animals to produce her bone china, which was then used to create her work. This somewhat unusual, painstaking and almost morbid process to my mind elevates her work into the realm of outstanding entries. Sydney resident Jan Downes used the translucency of porcelain in her work "Shoal Mates 1 and 2". Two panels of timber frames, mounted on the wall, separated 6 panels of carved porcelain which were lit up from behind with LED lights, revealing the intricate carvings while the light penetrated the delicate porcelain slabs. Close to home, New Zealander Madeleine Child from Dunedin, delighted with a lighthearted wall installation of gigantic pop corn titled "Poppop". Certainly a challenge to install, every piece of popcorn was handbuilt into different forms and finished with ceramic gold.

Winner of the 2012 award, Gold Coaster Leisa Russell’s piece Wave Rock delighted visitors with a delicate, overall, random patterned small sculptural form, using porcelain and stains. The piece came alive with the evocative feeling of motion of water and waves. Representing colour amongst the whiteness was long-standing icon of the Australian ceramic tradition, Greg Daly. His large, wheel thrown earthenware vessel "After Glow" exploded with a lustre finish of many colours, from bright oranges to purples, turquoise and greens, reminiscent of burning forests and bushfires so familiar in the Australian landscape. Sydney’s Simone Frasers vessel named "Contained Impressions" was another colourful piece. The textured and punctured appearance and of this spectacular piece was highlighted by the colourful dry glazes which were applied and fired three times. Greens and blues on the outside, oranges and purples on the inside, peeping through the voids. The next International Ceramic Art Award will be staged in 2016. Michaela Kloeckner is a ceramist and freelance writer. She lives and works on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. top - Greg Daly - After Glow bowl 3 opposite first row l. to r. - Simone Fraser - Contained Impressions - Caroline Walkergrime - Fading Memories second row l. to r. - John Dermer - Kate Dorrough - Land & Shadows - Niharika Hukku - Dark Sky - Jenny Orchard - Vase third row l. to r. - Leisa Russell - Wave Rock - porcelain - Helen Fuller - Xiaodong Bian - Cocoon1 fourth row l. to r. - Gabi Sturman - Running the Gauntlet - Madeleine Child - Poppop

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AUSTRALIA

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COMPETITION

... but why ceramics? The 7th International Biennal de Ceràmica in El Vendrell

prizewinners present their work in a joint exhibition. A trilingual catalogue about the prizewinners is also published. www. elvendrell.cat

Going beyond the facts

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he facts

The International Biennal de Ceràmica was founded in 2001. The number of ceramists participating in the competition has increased from year to year, with the competition initially being for Catalonia in 2001, the whole of Spain in 2003, for Europe in 2005 and from 2007 worldwide. The Biennial was established and is run by the municipality of El Vendrell, it takes place every “odd" year and the three prizewinning artists show their work in an exhibition. The first prize: an album compiled by an art historian on the work of the winner of the first prize, with illustrations and an appreciation of their work in Spanish, Catalan and English. The album is presented during the award ceremony. The second and third prizes: the three

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I can barely remember how I received the call for entries to the 7th International Biennal de Ceràmica from El Vendrell. I confess that I had to refer to a map to find this town, which is situated by the sea about 70 km from Barcelona in Catalonia. I accordance with the rules, I sent in photos of my work for the preliminary selection of participants. On the basis of these photos, I received an invitation to take part in the Biennal. The judges then awarded the prizes at the exhibition of the participants. A year later, in 2014, I travelled to El Vendrell myself at the invitation of the organisers for the opening of the prizewinners' exhibition. The mayor, his deputy and the president of the arts committee opened the exhibition in the Sala Portal del Prado, the town's refurbished mediaeval exhibition space. They presented the album and the catalogue, which are the true prizes of the Biennal. Then there was a slide show in the conference room and the prizewinners had the opportunity to speak about their work. As artists, we felt that our work had been honoured in an exhibition of the highest standard, and it was understood in this city. But one thought preyed upon my mind: "... but why ceramics?" Traditional pottery villages, places that have

Pálma Babos

become famous through their ancient ceramics or newer cities with a modern ceramics industry are usually the ones who want to raise awareness of their existence worldwide by setting up an international ceramics biennial. These cities and their citizens feel their ceramic tradition is extremely important as they are a part of their present day lives. They want to find a place on the cultural map through a special event. These ideas disappeared from my mind as soon as I arrived for the Biennal exhibition. Modern twentieth century art owes much to a number of Catalan artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Antoni Tàpies. The presence of the arts can be sensed all over the town, but I could still not grasp why it wanted to become known all over the world through ceramics, of all things. Velvety-warm cello music floated through the narrow streets and alleyways and its blue-brown tonalities lodged itself in my ear, as it were. Classical cello music was even playing in the specialist stores filled with the technical and manu-

In the streets of El Vendrell

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EL VENDRELL

The chimney of a former ceramics factory in the centre of town

The prizewinners at the opening of the exhibition

factured goods of the 21st century. This is the town where Pau Casals (as Pablo Casals, one of the greatest cellists of all time is known here) was born and grew up. According to Pau Casals, musical sounds are colours – and in his music there is certainly an element of painting. But I also managed to find some threads that linked the town with ceramics. The former sculptor and ceramist from Barcelona, a friend of Picasso's, Apel la Fenosa, set up his summer studio in a sixteenth century house in the town. His home with its fabulous Mediterranean garden has been converted into a museum, where his sculptures – mainly created in clay – are currently on show. I was fascinated to study his drawings, from the beginning of the 20th century, for vessels on show here together with prototypes from the Limoges factory. The collector Deu Font left his private collection to the town. As a museum, this collection still contains examples of 20th century ceramics. On my strolls, I suddenly discovered a tall factory chimney. The workshops and the craftsmen have long disappeared, now it is surrounded by apartments, cafes and restaurants. From the local clay, which was of average quality, ceramic building components used to be made for house building, and they can still be found today. But the laws of economic necessity proved to be stronger: the small factories were destroyed by global industry. The chimney now stands in the middle of town like an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence.

top to bottom - Grand Prize; Pálma Babos: Collapse; photo: Joan Güixens Orpinell

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CERAMICS & TRAVEL

- second prize; Andrew Casto: Assemblage 47 photo: Joan Güixens Orpinell - third prize; Miguel Molet: Swing; photo: Joan Güixens Orpinell

However, it looks as though things may continue with regard to contemporary ceramic art in the town In 2004, under the presidency of a ceramist Camil la Perez Silva, the municipal arts committee was established from among the craftspeople of the town. This organisation sees itself as the executor of the legacy of the former traditional local ceramics industry in the town. They believe that culture and art represent important values even in the 21st century and through their integrative power, they will be able to bring the city and more distant regions closer together. For the continuation of the Biennal, compiling a ceramics collection and the realisation of cultural plans, ceramists like us can only wish them staying power and creativity, for our activities and our work have been greatly honoured, appreciated and understood in this small, culture-friendly city of El Vendrell. Babos Pálma - porcelain artist - AIC member 2040 Budaörs, Szamóca köz 1. Hungary Mobile: +36 30 3760383 http://www.babospalma.hu

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ANNIVERSARY

Anniversary at Burg Giebichenstein

Doris Weilandt

photos - Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle

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he renowned university of art in Halle, Burg Giebichenstein, celebrates its hundredth birthday this year. The ceramics workshops were one of the contributors to the good reputation of its courses. Artists such as Marguerite Friedlaender, Gerhard Marcks, Hubert Griemert and Gertraud Möhwald helped to establish the international renown of this department. Because of them, the expression “Burgkeramik” became current, a trademark for an independent direction in ceramics. Right from the founding of the workshop, a special development became

apparent. Inspired by reform movements like the Werkbund, the first director, sculptor Gustav Weidanz, sought a connection between craft and industry. In experiments with form and glaze, prototypes for small production series were created. Geometrical tea sets from cast earthenware that emerged in this process leave a lasting impression through their timeless modernity. In 1925, Bauhaus graduate Marguerite Friedlaender took over the course, which she adapted after the model of the Dornburg Werkstatt. Teaching was separated from production, clay bodies and glazes

were tested. Within a very short time, she developed a series of thin-walled vessel shapes with a cylindrical body, whose form was to influence following generations. Under the name of Werkstätten der Stadt Halle (“Workshops of the City of Halle"), ceramic products marked with a stamp showing a tower and the arch of a bridge were successfully offered for sale in the college's own shop. As a result of a commission for Marguerite Friedlaender from the Staatliche Porzellanmanufaktur Berlin, a porcelain workshop was established in which production prototypes were developed. Under the

above Marquerite Friedlaender-Wildenhein Coffee set "Hallesche Form" decor Trude Petri, 1931 left Gustav Weidanz Teaset 1922 / 23

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ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION name “Hallesche Form", coffee, mocha and tea sets were developed in 1930, which served as prototypes for further tableware sets. With the porcelain tableware sets Bagdad and Tiergarten by Gerhard Marcks, a basis was created for porcelain design reduced to form, which had a lasting influence. For both artists, the highly fruitful period of work at the Burg ended when the Nazis seized power. The following director, Hubert Griemert, continued the work of Otto Lindig, who at that time was still running the former Bauhaus pottery in Dornburg as a private leaseholder. The designs of Friedlaender and her husband Franz Rudolf Wildenhain could no longer be produced as both artists had retained the rights. This repertoire had to be replaced by new collections. This led to the craft character of the ceramics again taking a more prominent role. Griemert set great value upon effective glazes and a painterly feel. His experiments at high temperature in the porcelain kiln producing a matt finish were very successful. He was awarded a gold medal for them at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937. The Second World War was a watershed moment for the courses at the Burg too. By the time Griemert was called up himself in 1943, the number of students had steadily been falling. After 1945, functionality was the order of the day all over the country and the clamour for practical items of daily use was also heard at the Burg. But painters and sculptors at the art school like Gustav Weidanz, Charles Crodel, Karl Müller, Erwin Hahs and Waldemar Grzimek took advantage of being able to start from scratch, experimenting freely in the field of ceramics. This left a mark. The course was expanded to include three-dimensional design, painted decor and working experimentally with the materials. Heidi Manthey, who later taught ceramic decor at the Burg herself, was heavily influenced for her delicate, cautiously applied decor by her teacher, Crodel. The link between art and design became a special characteristic of ceramics from Halle.

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When Gertraud Möhwald, who had studied under Weidanz, took over the workshop in 1970, a new era began. The wheel disappeared almost entirely, vessels were assembled from rolled-out slabs. Marks of the making process remained visible – unadorned and without a decorative glaze. Möhwald's training courses focused on the material, which permits sculptural experiments. In Giebichenstein, students on the ceramics course received a challenge that made them sensitive to artistic processes. Studying became a decision in favour of a concept of life. Today, ceramics is part of the department of sculpture. Martin Neubert, one of her students, is professor. He has placed the focus of the

above Gertraud Möhwald Bust of M.M. 1991, ceramic

photo Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle Nikolaus Brade

bottom Johannes Fötsch Frontal Damage 2014, stoneware, porcelain photo - Elisabeth Oertel

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ANNIVERSARY course on failures. He believes that contrary to the general desire for perfection, it is disturbances and disconcerting elements that bear a creative potential, which must be discovered and heeded – similar to Johann Friedrich Böttcher, who wanted to make gold but discovered porcelain instead. In the first two years of the course, the potential of the material is examined, mainly clay, studying how content can take sculptural form. Almost anything goes: spreading, sawing, squeezing, breaking, overfiring. A background in craft, a qualification as a potter has not been a prerequisite for some time for applicants to be accepted on the ceramics course. Instead, openness to new ideas and a sense of humour are important characteristics to be successful in the search for an individual artistic language. Martin Neubert still sees what is special about studying at the Burg, a course that generations of ceramists enthuse about: “The relationship to the students is very close and trusting. They have time to try out their ideas, to find what matters to them. Initially, work is not very result-orientated, but instead it focuses on what is learned from experiment. At best, the pieces are simply there. Work that has been seen through with decent craft technique is fine with me.” These are ideal conditions for artistic development in a place that allows you the freedom to develop your vision. Doris Weilandt studied art history, classical archaeology and ancient history in Jena and Halle. She is a journalist, writer and art historian.

left - Isabella Sissi - Mother and Child, 2014, clay photo - Isabella Sissi

bottom left - Lotte Buch - untitled, 2014, porcleain photo - Alexander Burzik

bottom right Hermann Grüneberg - "I die for you", 2015, clay, wood photo - Renée Schaeffer

EXHIBITION

The Village

- a ceramic installation

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he Village, an installation, can be described as a work in progress, but it is not necessarily the individual work or the end product that is the focus; it is the origination process and the developments within it that are important too. The Village was started in 1993 at the EKWC (European Ceramic Workcentre) in the Netherlands, and over the past 22 years, it has been successively enlarged during various work phases in The Village - Kunstzentrum Karlskaserne, Ludwigsburg, 2015 various locations. The installation now consists of more than 1,000 fired ceramic sculptures (1160°C). The individual pieces have been formed by hand, a personal style is recognisable. The size of the individual pieces references the holistic working process using the hands. The pieces have developed from an experimental approach to working with clay. Only what has been absolutely necessary to express formal and contentual ideas has been done. Further refinement or adornment of the pieces is of no interest. The work is not result orientated. Instead I have here conceived a world in a compilation of impressions. It is the making that is important and not the end result. The installation fascinates because of the restricted formal vocabulary of the individual pieces and the inexhaustible wealth of forms of the overall installation. The making process has changed very much from the beginning until now. In the beginning, the pieces were made spontaneously and in quick succession: The results corresponded to the working methods and were rough and simple. Today the pieces are better thought out and more subtle. My approach is abstract. The individual pieces are reminiscent of things from the real world, without copying or naming them. They are individual, personal creations – metaphors in simple, primal, emblematic forms that offer a wide range of associative possibilities. There is an autobiographical background to the installation. The title, The Village, refers to my own childhood, growing up, adolescence in village surroundings. The narrative of my work speaks of everyday life, my experience with people and things, my memories and in particular my visual impressions. But it is not about recounting what happened to me in the village: I have internalised the experiences and memories and, as if through a filter, have transformed them into abstract, autonomous artistic forms. The forms have thus become independent and come about automatically while I am working. One form leads to another. The experiences and memories from my personal life have turned into a formal vocabulary. They have become self-sustaining and universal. Externally, most of the forms are architectural. Simple, typical basic clay elements such as the cone (coiled) or the cube (slab built), open to one or more sides, are conspicuous: towers, enclosures. These objects are often enhanced with snakes or strands of clay. They are charged with energy and create various moods. The work is a study of general human states or feelings, but also of contrasts: inside and outside, hard and soft, coarse and fine, fragile and sturdy. The abstract forms reveal human desires and needs: openness and closedness, attack and defence. Processes of retreat or opening, communication, a search for protection and security, vulnerability are all recurring themes. Beyond this, The village is both an archive and a reservoir for me. It is an unlimited field of experimentation for forms and ideas from which other, perhaps large scale, objects can evolve. Thomas Weber, December 2014

The latest stage of development of The Village can be seen at the Keramikmuseum Westerwald in Höhr-Grenzhausen from 20 September 2015 to 3 January 2016

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EXHIBITION

Carouge: Follow the Line

Stéphanie Le Follic-Hadida

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he Parcours Céramique Carougeois was initiated in 1989 and has been organised by the Bruckner Foundation since 2010. It has increasingly become a meeting place for artists, collectors and lovers of contemporary ceramics. Over nine days from 19 – 27 September 2015, Carouge will become an attractive shop window for 45 makers of ceramic art from twelve countries. Partner galleries in Carouge, Ferme de la Chapelle, Halles de la Fonderie and Musée Ariana and Musée de Carouge are jointly involved to give this event its due weight. The theme: “Line” The 14th edition of the Parcours Céramique Carougeois is devoted to the theme of “Line”. First and foremost, Line can be understood as an invitation to a “parcours” amongst the 25 art galleries and cultural venues involved. A line is also intended to guide the visitors through the exhibited works of ceramic art, to give them the opportunity to become acquainted – or reacquainted – with ceramics, and also to understand its textures, planes, themes, harmonies and its installation in space. For several years, the Parcours Céramique Carougeois has increasingly taken its lead from sculptural forms of expression. This has happened at the expense of small, functional items, but on the other hand, changes in contemporary ceramics can clearly be traced. Bold colours and forms The Parcours Céramique Carougeois wants to demonstrate what it is that is currently on our minds and to reflect trends and developments in relation to the medium and new ways of working with it. It has always been addressed to schools of ceramics as a talent pool and incubator for new currents, and it invites the young makers to meet contemporary artists. Today, contemporary art accords contemporary ceramic art more space with its bold colours and forms. It almost seems as if a rapprochement of these two worlds would come about, which have been artificially separated since the eighties, or even as if there is a reversal of trends and clay as a medium is becoming a possibility for a return to traditional values in fine art as a whole. Modernity along side tradition By taking clay as an unlimited medium not tied to the traditional rules

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above - Ruth Borgenicht - Kimono - 2008 below - Takashi Hinoda - Something invevitable

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EXHIBITION

of ceramics (glaze and firing), completely unexpected creative possibilities emerge. Ideal conditions to link the world of art and the world of ceramics and to appreciate ceramics as a creative medium. Conversely, ceramics is also currently on the ascendant: more and more freshly trained ceramists are taking up the challenge of traditional techniques such as wood firing and glazing. An exciting “ceramics era” has begun. Familiar names The selection for the 14th Parcours Céramique Carougeois is characterised by a refelction upon the diverse manifestations of ceramics, well finished, sensitive, expressive and inventive, combined with the makers’ desire to find the ideal form. This year, leading ceramic artists are competing, some of whom are already familiar to ceramics lovers in Geneva: Magdalena Gerber, who is exhibiting with Annick Zufferey; Gustavo Perez exhibiting his latest thrown vessels at Marianne Brand's gallery, pieces in which formal and graphic lines combine more and more forcefully. Philippe Barde and Toshio Matsui can be seen at Peter Kammermann's space. They continue their study of everyday objects, carrying on their experiments together under the label of PT Project, working on the traditional bowl form, woodfiring and urushi lacquer. Ursula Morley-Price, Karin Bablok, Henk Wolvers, Design Studio Renens and Andreas Steinemann scrutinise the fundamental rhythm of objects, the void and the necessary connection between plane and line in favour of dynamism. Repetition, urban graphics, reduction The work of Jeanne Bonnefoy-Mercuriali, Claire Marfisi and Anita Manshanden is based on the repetition of individual elements (a handle, a formal motif), they take possession of space by stringing forms together. Nicolas Rousseau works with white earthenware and with his pieces he examines urban graphics reminiscent of mangas. Marie-Noëlle Lepens, who is exhibiting at Ferme de la Chapelle, works from the basic shape of the brick as her starting point to reflect on forms of living and the repetition of individual elements. Charlotte Nordin, also at Ferme de la Chappelle, is constructing an installation during the exhibition, spontaneously and with the cooperation of the public. This year‘s subject also charted which great international works would be on show at les Halles de la Fonderie. Five artists – Ruth Borgenicht, Michel Gouéry, Esben Klemann, Bente Skjottgaard and Marit Tingleff – each stage in their own way a construction, a trace in space or on the horizon, a fabric of surprising forms or of existential eroticism. Back in Europe Besides the exhibition Luxe, calme et volupté organised by swissceramics, the Musée Ariana is showing six pieces by Takashi Hinoda until 22 November. Movement, speed and hybrid creatures are characteristic of his work. Takashi Hinoda is already well known in the USA. In Europe, he is exhibiting for the first time since his participation at the Vallauris Biennale in 1994. The incredible wealth of these works of ceramic art makes the 14th Parcours Céramique Carougeois an outstanding experience. This has only been possible thanks to the goodwill and passion of everyone involved. Stéphanie Le Follic-Hadida is the curator of the 14th Parcours Céramique Carougeois.

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top to bottom - Marit Tingleff - Panorama - Andreas Steinemann - Collection - 08 - Atelier-Orange - Manshanden / Krista Grecco - Monkey Call - Ursula Morley-Price - Bowl - 2014, ceramic, 21.5 x 27 cm

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EXHIBITION

“EDITION 2015” Ceramics from Baden-Württemberg at the Keramikmuseum Staufen A joint initiative of the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe and the craft association BdK Baden-Württemberg Judith Brauner

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ith this exhibition, the visitors gain an insight into the current ceramics scene in southwest Germany. Work by 24 ceramists is on show, which in their diversity and originality illustrate the various manifestations of clay as a medium. The BdK (Bund der Kunsthandwerker – crafts’ association) invited its members to submit their latest work. From among these, a panel of judges from the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe and the Friends of the Keramikmuseum Staufen made their selection, focusing particularly on giving space to as many craft techniques and artistic directions as possible and to exhibit pieces in which the individual intentions of the artists are expressed.

Whether functional tableware, vessels, mural reliefs, abstract forms or fine art sculptures, handbuilt, cast or thrown, stoneware or porcelain, raku or woodfired, scored, painted or glazed – around 50 pieces were on show that are all unique and clearly demonstrate the artists personal style. At the museum, the works are arranged in groups in the various rooms. The vessels of Ute Kathrin Beck, for instance, make a deep impression through their sense of wholeness and the powerful presence of form and sculptural elements. In the vase Homage to Sissi, the coloured glaze in the interior forms an interesting contrast to the matt, sculpted exterior. Gabi Ehrminger exhibits her double-

walled vessels. She is concerned with clarity and reduction of form combined with precision of finish. She continues and old tradition in surface treatment: the repeated burnishing of the surfaces with a pebble when the clay is leatherhard. This compresses the body and produces a very smooth, silky surface. The piece is then fired in a wood kiln. Kenji Fuchikawa throws his ceramics on the wheel and he consciously chooses reduced forms. Especially the subtly used glazes give each piece its own character. He has been experimenting with sea cucumber glazes for some time now, a combination of various raw materials that produces special crystals, creating the impression of the skin of a sea cucumber.

above - Amei Unrath-Ruof, “Schalenspiel” three-part, d 14, 23 and 36 cm left - Dagmar Langer sculpture: “Arche Besatzung 7” w 60 cm, d 12 cm, h 17 cm

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EXHIBITION "Oscillating Bowls" is the name Hozana Gomes da Costa gives to her pieces, in which she combines the simplicity of the form with balance, lightness and harmony. The vessels are thrown and have no foot to stand on, but they balance on a single point without toppling. This stability is achieved by the perfect distribution of the material. The unglazed, matt exteriors contrast with the interiors with a transparent glaze, which also lead to a different colour effect. Dagmar Langer often combines her vessel sculptures with figural elements, for instance in her piece Arche Besatzung 7 (“Arc crew 7”), which takes a prominent position in the exhibition. It shows human figures on the lid of a voluminous bowl, the surfaces covered with irregular graphic elements. The lid can be opened. In the interior, strong red colouring is revealed. With her delicate porcelain bowls, Amei Unrath-Ruof successfully links with nature. When stacked up inside each other, they look like petals or rings on water and are expressive of great harmony. Her forms are elliptical, the surfaces matt and the rims irregular. Each piece reveals the maker’s skilful, experimental treatment of the material. This matches the title of the work: Schalenspiel - Game of Bowls Judith Brauner is a specialist for the fields of communication and PR. She works as a freelance consultant and lives in Freiburg im Breisgau, South Germany.

The exhibition runs until 30 November 2015. Keramikmuseum Staufen, Wettelbrunner Straße 3 D-79219 Staufen www.landesmuseum.de

top to bottom - Ute Kathrin Beck, Vase “Homage to Sissi” - Gabi Ehrminger, double-walled vessel h 15 cm, d 16.5 cm - Heide Nonnenmacher, sculpture: “Koralle”, d 18 cm, l 26 cm right - Kenji Fuchiwaki, “Vase with sea cucumber glaze” d 26, h 40 cm - Joachim Lambrecht, sculpture: “Dorje” l 55 cm, d 23 cm

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Exhibitors:

Ute Kathrin Beck, Stuttgart; Jutta Becker,Karlsruhe; Gabi Ehrminger, Radolfzell; Monika and Stefan Fitzlaff, Kirchberg/Jagst Mistlau; Kenji Fuchiwaki, Ludwigsburg; Hozana Gomes da Costa, Leonberg; Christine Hitzblech, Stutensee-Spöck; Angelika Karoly, Rottweil; Markus Klausmann, Waldkirch; Joachim Lambrecht, Großschönach; Dagmar Langer, Karlsruhe; Susanne Lukacs-Ringel, Zwiefalten; Angela Munz, Welzheim; Heide Nonnenmacher, Nattheim; Dorothee Pfeifer, Trossingen; Annette Schwarte, Freiburg; Martina Sigmund-Servetti, Heilbronn; Elisa Stützle-Siegsmund, Müllheim; Aisaku Suzuki, Breisach; Amei Unrath-Ruof, Baltmannsweiler; Herbert Wenzel, Oberderdingen; Peter Wichmann, Stuttgart; Barbara Wieland, Nagold.

COMPETITION

Awards at the 59th Concorso di Faenza - the eldest European ceramics competition

Monika Gass

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n early May the prizes and the distinctions were awarded at the MIC, the International Museum of Ceramics, in the oldest ceramics competition in Europe. The judges’ decisions were reached unanimously, if not without copious discussions: with Claudia Casali, director of the MIC Faenza, Monika Gass, director of the Keramikmuseum Westerwald in HöhrGrenzhausen, Germany, Grant Gibson, director of the Crafts Council Magazine and Daniela Lotta, lecturer at the ISIA Faenza in art and design, professionals familiar with the international ceramics scene were at work. More than 1300 pieces from 618 artists and 67 countries had been submitted. It is interesting to note that the most important prizes went to projects that demand contemporary comment and that their conception, flawless in execution and ceramic detail, lightheartedly challenges the pool of criticism of our everyday surroundings. The prize of the Fondazione del Monte e Cassa di Risparmio di Faenza for participants over 40, worth EUR 15,000, went to Silvia Celeste Calcagno and her piece "Interno 8 – La fleur coupée".

The artist’s narrative statement of the position of women – expressed in personal and general terms – was impressive, fragile as it was provocative, poetically composed in the language of art as it was bold and frank; in combination an overall complex ceramic composition of a total of 2,000 small, minutely fascinating, meticulously printed tablets. Installation, photography and print on ceramics render the details of the illustration, the facets of intercultural comment, a multilayered and variously interpretable contemporary artist’s statement. http://www.silviacalcagno.it/homepage The Faenza Prize for artists under 40, worth EUR 10,000, was shared equally by Helene Kirchmair from Austria for her piece "Bobbles" and Thomas Stollar (USA) for "1900 steps #2". What fascinates here on the one hand is the devotion to illusion: soft-looking, cushion-like objects reveal hard, rough surfaces in Kirchmaier’s piece with muted matt shades skilfully suggested by the micro-spheres on the giant Bubbles… a yearning for plush softness achieved in brittle, hard, white technoid surfaces. http://www.lenzis-art.com

FAENZA

On the other hand, Thomas Stollar’s idea is quite different: starting from his daily trip to the studio under GPS surveillance etc., his piece "1900 steps #2" is a digitally inspired forensic examination in ceramics using an inlay technique that only gradually becomes visible. This piece stands on its packing case as a plinth, vividly interpreted as a sculpture in this combination. http://thomastollar.com The Cersaie Prize donated by Edi. Cer S.p.A. worth EUR 10,000 was awarded to Nicholas Lees from the UK for his work "Four Leaning Vessels". Precise incisions in vase-like sculptures provide aesthetic confusion, which the eye tries to fathom from various angles. Light, form, technique, meaning merge to form artistically targeted communication with the observer. http://www.nicholaslees.com Further prizes went to Simon Szolt Jószef for Spherical Atlas, to Marie-Laure GobatBouchat (Switzerland) and Monika J. Schoedel-Mueller & Werner B. Nowka from Germany, who together received a prize for their piece Blüten und Blätter (“Blossoms and Leaves”), a composition in white made of multicoloured layers of clay. A further winner was Omur Tokgoz from Turkey for her typical wafer-thin bowls entitled Relativity. Yves Malfliet from Belgium was awarded a prize for his confrontational ceramics-video installation, "Somewhere over the Mountain", showing a mountain idyll in an air raid, typical of the work of this provocatively critical, political artist. Distinctions also went to

COMPETITION

opposite page top - view of the exhibition opposite page bottom l. to r. - Premio Faenza over 40 Silvia Celeste Calgagno (IT) Interno 9 - La fleur coupée, 2014 200 x 300 x 3 cm - Premio Faenza under 40 ex aequo Helene Kirchmair (AT) Bobbles, 2014, 24 x 35 cm above - the award ceremony below l. to r. - Premio Faenza under 40 ex aequo Thomas Stollar (USA) 1900 steps # 2 100 x 60 x 25 cm - Premio Cersaie Nicholas Lees (GB) Four leaning vessels, 2014 36 x 70 x 20 cm

Photos - International Museum for Ceramic, Faenza / Monika Gass

COMPETITION

Kathy Ruttenberg, USA, for "Lost at Sea" and Ann Van Hoey, Belgium for a lovely variation, "The Earthenware Ferrari". Chiara Lecca, IT, presented an absolute eye catcher with her prizewinning object, "Tryptych of True Fake Marble", a provocative aesthetic imitation of marbling using animal intestines over porcelain. Giulio Mannino was also among the prizewinners for "Sol 6272 Hz", IT. As the youngest competitor in the Concorso, Irina Razumovskaya also won a prize. For her beautiful, lifelong, continually developing work in and for ceramics, Erna Aaltonen from Finland was also honoured. Further interesting exhibits included Frank Louis, Austria, with one of his typical installations, Sangwoo Kim, Korea, with a burnished piece and Ule Ewelt with a large figure of a bison. The oldest competition in Europe on the theme of ceramics, at the MIC Faenza, has been rejuvenated and is now on a broader footing. The number of applications, the kind of work submitted and the quality of the pieces speak for themselves. It is evident that Director Claudia Casali has forged a pathway for the MIC Faenza into the network of European and international ceramics, that many artists in attendance for the opening in Faenza feel well represented and that the accompanying programme with the presentations of the prizewinners and a tour of the studios in Faenza such as Atelier Zauli has been well received.

Much has changed at the Museum in Faenza in the few years since Claudia Casali has been in charge: step by step, it has been reorganised, new areas have been made accessible to the public with specialist displays, the education department has grown, and studios in Faenza are repeatedly shown outside Italy in the same way as guests from all over Europe are invited to show their work in Faenza. Exhibitions in co-operation with the Keramikmuseum Westerwald, the Gmunden Symposium, the Helsinki Group and the MIC show how it has opened up to events in international ceramics as a whole. Ever closer ties within Europe and the mood of lively interchange via the social networks allow artists to experience in real time what their colleagues are making, thinking, showing and exhibiting. A considerable group of top notch individuals exhibiting work of the highest standard on many occasions is being superseded by new and different developments which facilitate the next wave of artistic comment in ceramics, design, art and craft. The works selected by the judges for exhibition and those which have won prizes will be on show until 24 January 2016. A catalogue has been published. Further details and the accompanying programme on: www.micfaenza.org Monika Gass is a ceramist, an art historian and the director of the Keramikmuseum Westerwald.

FAENZA

opposite page top l. to r. - Premio d’Onore Presidenza del Senato - Yves Malfliet (BE) Somewhere... over the mountain, 2013, 93 x 39 x 34 cm - Premio d’Onore Presidenza della Camera dei Deputati Katy Ruttenberg (USA), Lost At Sea, 2014, 66 x 45 x 12 cm - Premio de la Presidenza dell’Assemblea Legislativa della Regione Emilia-Romagna - Chiara Lecca (IT) Tryptych of true fake marble, 2014, 92 x 110 x 34 cm opposite page top l. to r. - Premio de la Presidenza Regione Emilia-Romagna - Ann van Hoey (BE), The Earthenware Ferrari, 2014, 23 x 40 x 30 cm - Medaglia della Rivista D’A - Irina Razumovskaya (RU) Balance, 2014, 50 x 20 x 30 cm above l. to r - Menzione d’Onore - Erna Aaltonen (FI), Noki, 2014, 45 x Ø 50 cm - Premio del Rotary Club, M. J. Schödel-Müller & W. B. Nowka (DE), Blüten und Blätter, 2014, 19 x 80 x 30 cm below l. to r. - Premio Monica Biserni, Zsolt Jòsef Simon (HU), Spherical Atlas, 2014, Ø 32 cm, Ø 23 cm, Ø 19 cm - Premio Lions Club Faenza Host,Ömür Tokgöz (TU) Relativity 2, 2013, Ø 15cm

COMPETITION

BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOK WITH FIRE - RICHARD HIRSCH A Life between Chance and Design by Scott Meyer, Ph.D. With Fire is the story of ceramic artist Richard Hirsch, and an examination of the work for which he is so widely celebrated. This richly illustrated book presents the life of an artist whose career spans some of the most important developments in the American Clay Movement. Hirsch established a connection with the legendary Raku and Ohi families, whose influence created a lasting pedagogical and creative link to the West that continues today. ARTIST'S PREFACE - Raku is by now a universally recognized term. Conventionally, it has been associated with the world of studio ceramics. However, for quite some time now, I have constructed and applied a wider meaning to this idiom. I have used the word "raku" to characterize a particular attitude, my way of thinking and working as an artist. For me, raku is a state of mind. This mental outlook transcends specific mediums and formats, and is applicable to all artistic endeavours. There are particular pragmatic guidelines that delineate my methodology. Put into action, their usage signifies my personal sentiments. Raku, for me - Encompasses acceptance of the unexpected - Seeks out discovery and joyful surprise - Rejects the notion that the accidental is always fortuitous - Relies on experience, discipline and focus to achieve success - Incorporates the utilization of intuition and improvisation - Balances spontaneity and looseness with controlled skilfulness - Strives for a seamless fluidity between concept, material, process and technique. Ultimately, in spending most of my working career as an artist seeking to define this term, raku has become my personal philosophy, not merely a way of working, but a way of life. Rick Hirsch, May 2012. About the Author - Scott Meyer is Professor of Ceramics at the University of Montevallo in Alabama. He has authored numerous articles and is the recipient of many awards for creative excellence and teaching. Meyer’s work with Richard Hirsch has spanned studio, kiln, writing and instructional workshops. Their current work in process, The Crucible Project, has further defined their collaborative talents. Boydell Press (2012), 160 Seiten, 23 x 28 cm. English, ISBN-10: 1933360976 I ISBN-13: 978-1933360973

HORST KERSTAN - Keramik der Moderne (“Modernist Ceramics”) Ed. Maria Schüly for Städtischen Museen Freiburg, Augustinermuseum Horst Kerstan (1941–2005) profoundly influenced German ceramics after 1945. His interest focused on the vessel as an individual, one-off piece. An artist who won numerous domestic and international awards, he began his career as an apprentice in the pottery of the eminent ceramist Richard Bampi (1896-1965), in Kandern, southern Black Forest, which he later took over. As a result of the study of Jean Arp, Kerstan created unmistakable fruit and wave forms, demonstrating his autonomous formal vocabulary. He also studied sculpture and painting. Encouraged by Picasso and Miro, he offered artists such as Horst Antes, Otmar Alt and Bernd Völkle the opportunity to work with ceramics in sculptures, images and vessels in his studio. Chinese ceramics encouraged Kerstan to achieve the highest degree of perfection and refinement in form and glaze. In contrast, Japanese ceramics taught him an unmistakable minimalism and allowed him to find great spontaneity of expression. In 1977, Kerstan built the first Japanese woodfired kiln of the anagama type in Germany, which made a completely new kind of surface possible through firing in direct contact with flame and ash. He found a new challenge with the raku technique, developing from 1990 his own artistic interpretation. Strong colours and tulip shapes were typical of Kerstan’s late work. Maria Schüly presents the whole of Kerstan’s creative output in all its diversity for the first time, systematically and arranged on thematic groups. Numerous large format illustrations whet the reader’s appetite to become involved with the artist, his times and his unmistakable work. The study is completed by a documentation of historic photos and an overview of Kerstan’s marks. This richly illustrated volume presents the life and work of Horst Kerstan on the basis of the latest research. His individual style – inspired by traditional Chinese and Japanese glaze technique and the study of the art of his time – made a lasting impression on German ceramics in the second half of the 20th century. 216 pages, 24 x 28 cm, 265 illustrations in colour and black-and-white. Hard cover. German. E 39.80 [D], ISBN: 978-3-89790-433-0

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KS

BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS ZULU BEER VESSELS - In the Twentieth Century - Brewing beer has a long tradition with the Zulus, the largest ethnic group of South Africa. The beverage was traditionally prepared by women at home in ornate ceramic vessels specially made for this purpose. This book aims to present the rich palette of styles of these vessels in all their beauty and to save them from being forgotten. The colourful history of the Zulus since the early nineteenth century, including the violent racial segregation in recent years, accompanied a golden age of traditional arts and crafts that served as both a bestower of identity and provided a link to their ancestry. In the Zulu-speaking region there is a wealth of forms and decorative elements that is unprecedented in the ceramics of South Africa. This new book presents this diversity of forms in large format illustrations, classifies the beer vessels systematically and studies their history and geographical dissemination. This current publication documents this influence of colonial politics and of the subsequent apartheid laws on style and prevalence of the popular beer vessels. In ZULU BEER VESSELS, these vessels, which have almost completely disappeared from the present day lives of the Zulus, are presented and systematically analysed for the first time. An important contribution to the research on South African ceramics and a unique documentation of the beer vessels of the Zulus. 272 pages, 24.5 x 24.5 cm, 400 illustrations in colour and black-and-white, 3 maps. Brochure with dust jacket. English. E 49.80 [D] ISBN 978-3-89790-423-1

KERAMISCHE GEFÄSSE VON THOMAS BOHLE -

Keramische Objekte – Innere Räume. (“Ceramic Vessels by Thomas Bohle – Ceramic Objects – Inner Spaces”) With an interview by Hans-Joachim Gögl. The Austrian ceramic artist Thomas Bohle is an illustrious and extraordinary figure in the field of ceramic vessels. His double-walled objects, created at the wheel with technical perfection, effortlessly transcend the boundaries between ceramics and fine art. Their interior and exterior forms create an accentuated contrast which, in the dynamic succession of curve and counter-curve, concave and convex elements, opens up an exciting dialogue between the vessel and space. With clear elements and exciting correlations, Thomas Bohle opens up new dimensions for the art of the vessel as a fundamental possibility of abstract sculptural design. The publication offers a fascinating overview of over twenty-five years of vessel design by Thomas Bohle. Numerous illustrations of individual objects, group photos and details as well as expert essays uncover the beauty of precise geometry combined with painterly glazes and reveal just how progressive ceramics can be. In addition, radiographs of the works allow unimagined and hitherto unknown glimpses into the interior of the sculptures. A publication about one of the most distinctive vessel makers of the present, who convincingly demonstrates with his work that the ceramic vessel has lost none of its contemporary relevance. 240 pages, 24 x 32 cm, 80 illustrations in colour, 52 in black-and-white and 16 radiographs. Hard cover. German and English. E 49.80 [D], ISBN 978-3-89790-431-6

WEISSES GOLD (“White Gold”) -

In the second volume on its holdings in Chinese ceramics and in connection with an exhibition of the same name, the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst (Museum of East Asian Art) in Cologne has now reviewed its collection of Chinese porcelain and celadon. The catalogue, in German and English, was edited by the Chinese academic Jiena Huo, who was also responsible for the first catalogue, Frühchinesische Keramik (“Early Chinese Ceramics”). Holdings from 1400 – 1900 are presented and discussed in detail. Alongside outstanding blue-and-white porcelain dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the catalogue also includes a number of pieces with underglaze decoration, as well as elegant monochrome pieces, pure white Blanc de Chine and export porcelain. The presented objects are mainly from the Museum’s own collection, but they are complemented by permanent loans from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation. Among the particular highlights are architectural ceramics from palaces and temples in northern China, which were acquired by the founder of the Museum, Adolf Fischer in person. The holdings, which have never been shown before and have only been mentioned superficially in print, cover a period from the 15th to the 19th century, with a few pieces from the early 20th century. These include eave tiles, decorative elements from facades and roof ridges, figural ridge tiles and also hollow or wall tiles and typical Chinese roof beams –so / Weißes Gold. Porzellan und Baukeramik aus China 1400 bis 1900. Pub. Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, Cologne, 2015, German and English. E 29.90 ISBN 978-3-86335-748-1).

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INTERVIEW

In Studio with Marc

Leuthold

Marc Leuthold, Professor of Art, is extremely interested in cross-cultural issues. The Far East, Africa and the Mediterranean have influenced his work, and also socio-critical occurrences have a distinct voice in his installations. His intricately carved wheels are present in many of his works and we talk, among other things, about how they are made.

Evelyne Schoenmann

M

arc, let us begin with your impressive socio-critical installation “Torture”. I must say I admire your statement and your courage. Can you tell us about the historical background of this work? My courage?! Edward Snowden is the courageous one. I understand he is still living in the airport in Moscow. That is certainly an ironic situation: an American patriot seeking asylum in Russia. Jan

Guy at the Sydney College of the Arts encouraged me to apply for a Research Fellowship at her school. In the application, I detailed my interest in creating that viewer-activated installation. During my 19 day visit in Sydney, I raced the clock to finish and install the artwork – with wonderful support from Jan Guy, Clive Cooper and Liam Garstang. Gallery Director, Nicholas Tsoutas prioritized the installation and so he was a key person as well. Many people attended the opening and it was a marvellous experience.

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Because there was so little time to create such a piece, I did all the research and preparation before I left for Sydney. Once in Sydney, I created a calendar and so I knew what I would have to do every day. Sydney College of the Arts is a premier art school. It was a pleasure to be there. In the past you made other large scale installations like "Offering", "Longhouse", "Field", "Phong’s Table". Just to pick one, because it’s my favourite: who is Phong

and what is on the table for him? Phong Bui is the founding publisher and editor of the Brooklyn Rail, New York’s premier journal for contemporary art and criticism. Phong included my work in Irrational Profusion at the MOMA’s PS1 Art Museum. Phong selected 12 sculptures for this first and only clay exhibit at that Museum. I decided to create a piece, “Phong’s Table” with those 12 sculptures in homage to Phong. And, oh yes, I forgot about "Field". It

was created in China at the Fuping Museums. And this piece directly responds to Chinese culture, particularly the burial sites. In one of your many installations, in “Fault”, we see large painted circles and other patterns on the floor, surrounding your ceramics objects – like mandalas. What is the story behind this work? I created “Fault” for the Mark Pot-

ter Gallery in Watertown, CT in early 2008. And there was “Four Times” at the Schein-Joseph Museum at Alfred University. Earlier text based installations include “Hints” at the University of North Carolina in 2000 and “The Man who Eats Green Apples” featuring a poem by Korean ceramist, Sung Jae Choi. This last piece was installed at the Banff Centre in Canada in 1993. Another important collaborative installation was at the Chateau de la Napoule in France, also in 1993. This installation was titled “Toward a Nouvelle

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SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

INTERVIEW Ancien Regime” and artist Mario Cutajar collaborated in the creation of that piece during our fellowships at the Chateau. I enjoy these sorts of multi-media collaborative pieces because they encompass a wider and more complex conceptual vision. About “Fault” now: every piece in the show is cracked and damaged in some way – hence the title Fault. Artist Dawn Clements and I covered the floor with paper. With the lights out and with my eyes closed, I painted the floor with Sumi ink. I created this piece out of despair about the American electoral process. You once said that what we ceramists are doing is a kind of alchemy: we make something out of nothing. I like that! Yes, we make art from dust. Ceramics, though not fully accepted by the art world as a medium for creative expression, is one of the most ancient and primordial modes of expression. It records everything we do to it. It is perhaps the

We can see carvings, mostly in cone or wheel shaped forms, in many of your objects. In our preliminary talk you told me that it saddens you that people see you almost only in context with your famous wheels. How do you see your art evolving? I think the themes and topics and formal qualities of the installations suggest my deeper interests and concerns. Art is a voice or a message. The evolution is determined by circumstances and opportunity – it is difficult to predict these. Mario Cutajar in his essay, Marc Leuthold’s Good Form, has observed that the wheels are objects of contemplation – “rather than yield a singular meaning, they draw attention to the instability of association and the circular restlessness of obsession. They are abstract cogs designed to engage the senses and propel the machinery of the mind.” Would you explain the steps to one of those wheels just the same?

the works in soda, salt, and/or anagama kilns. I embrace all kinds of clay bodies and glazes and kilns and firing methods. After the piece emerges from the kiln, I think about presentation. Sometimes I present the work in the context of an installation or accompanied by a text. Sometimes I present the work as a solitary object, perhaps even mounting it on a base – in the spirit of the Rococo French who mounted Chinese porcelains on ormolu bronze bases. While the forms are generally related, each piece is unique. Recently you gave lectures at NCECA and at the Oldenburg Ceramics Fair. What can we see next from Marc Leuthold? Next spring I may be leading a class at China’s finest art school, the Central Academy of Fine Arts of Beijing. With any luck, there will be more exhibits. I’d like to exhibit more in Germany. I find the people there to be very interesting. Of course China is always in my hopes and dreams too.

photos – Eva Heyd

most tactile and sensitive medium. It is everything and yet it is nothing. What other material is so thoroughly fundamental yet so ignored? I’d love to know your opinion about art critique. Critics play a key role in educating the public and calling attention to overlooked artwork. If they do their job well and pick wisely, they play a valuable role in the art world.

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

NEW CERAMICS

I create a form to carve with wet clay. These forms are often thick and massive. When the clay is leather-hard, I carve it with a regular paring knife. Holding the knife at opposing angles, I can remove Vshaped slices that radiate from a starting point. Then I dry the sculpture slowly and then I do further subtractive work and refining at the stage before setting the work in the kiln. The works are then fired very slowly to a lower temperature. Sometimes the pieces are finished after that first firing. Other times I apply glaze and/or fire

Marc Leuthold www.marcleuthold.com New York, NY, USA

Evelyne Schoenmann's next interview will be with Alberto Bustos, Spain Evelyne Schoenmann is a ceramist. She lives and works in Basel, Switzerland, and Liguria, Italy www.schoenmann-ceramics.ch

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DATES

EXHIBITIONS / GALLERIES / MUSEUMS Copy date for entries: 01 October 2015

Amsterdam

: special exhibition

| V: vernissage | Fi: finissage |  end of the exhibition

"Das Dorf" Installation

NL-1017 KH Gallery Carla Koch Veemkade 500. Detroit Building, 6th floor T: +31-20-67 37 310 www.carlakoch.nl [email protected] O: Tue - Sat 12-18h, 1 Sun in the month 14-18h by appointment *A

Berlin

D-10585 Keramik-Museum Berlin Schustehrusstraße 13, O: Fri - Mon 13 - 17h www.keramik-museum-berlin.de

Thomas Weber

Galerie Workshop Fasanenstraße 11 T: +49-(0)30-3122567 O: Mon - Fri 10 - 19h, Sat 10 - 16h [email protected] www.wohnen-und-kunst.de Permanent exhibition of glass and ceramics, textil and juwelery

D-10623

D-13187 Zentrum für Keramik - Berlin Pestalozzistraße 18 T: +49-(0)30-499 02 591 O: Tue - Fri 14 - 17h *A www.ceramics-berlin.de D-10117 Galerie Arcanum - Charlottenstraße 34 T: +49-(0)30-33 02 80 95 [email protected] D-13187 Galerie Forum Amalienpark - Berlin-Pankow Breite Straße 2a T: +49-(0)30-20 45 81 66 O: Tue - Fri 14 - 17h www.amalienpark.de [email protected]

Bonstetten

CH-8906 GG - GALERIE FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST Elfi Bohrer. Im Dorfzentrum Burgwies 2 T: +41-(0)1-7003210. F: -7011027 [email protected] www.ggbohrer.ch O: Tue - Fri 14 - 18, Sat + Sun 13 - 17h *A : Camille Hagner, Richard Jurtisch, Rebecca Maeder - Malerei Objekte in Ton -  04.10.

Bozen

20. September 2015 bis 3. Januar 2016 im Keramikmuseum Westerwald, Höhr-Grenzhausen www.keramikmuseum.de



I-39100 TonHaus Rauschertorgasse 28 T+F: +39-(0)471-976681 O: Mon - Fri 9 - 12.30, 15 - 18, Sat 9 - 12.30h [email protected] www.tonhaus.it Permanent presentation of ceramics from different studios

Bremen D-28203

JO GROSS Galerie

Kohlhökerstraße 17 T: +49 (0)421-23 26 44 00 www.focke-museum.de

Brüssel

B-1050 Puls Contemporary Ceramics Edelknaapstraat 19 rue du Page (Châtelain) T: +32-26 40 26 55 www.pulsceramics.com [email protected] O: Wed-Sat 13 - 18h : Gitte Jungersen & Yves Malfliet - 12.09. - 10.10.

Bürgel

D-07616 Keramik-Museum Bürgel Am Kirchplatz 2 T: +49-(0)36692-37333. F: -37334 [email protected] www.keramik-museum-buergel.de

Bukarest RO 010094

Galerie GALATEEA Ceramic • Contemporary Art Calea Victoriei 132 T: +40 (0)21 - 317 38 14. [email protected] http://galeriagalateea.blogspot.com/ O: Tue - Fri 12 - 20h, Sat 11 - 19h Permanent Exhibition : Emil Cassian - "Blame"-  07.09.

Deidesheim 67146 Archiv-Atelier-Ausstellung

Stadtmauergasse 17 T: +49 (0)6326-1222 www.lottereimers.de O: daily 14 - 18h : Archiv-Atelier-Ausstellung - 05. - 27.09. - V: 05.09., 16h

Düsseldorf

Frechen D-50226 Stiftung Keramion - Zentrum für moderne + historische Keramik Bonnstraße 12. T: +49 (0)2234-6976-90, F: -920. F: -920 O: Tue - Fri 10 - 17, Sa 14 - 17 h

: "Ist Porzellan auch Keramik" -  10.01.2016 : Frechener Keramikpreis 2015 - Eröffnung, Preisverleihung und Bekanntgabe der Preisträger am 29.10. um 19 Uhr : Workshops für Kinder und Erwachsene - 05. bis 16.10. : Familientag - 25.10. von 11 bis 16 Uhr

Freiburg



D-79098 GALERIE FREDERIK BOLLHORST Oberlinden 25 T: +49-(0)151-15776033 O: Mon - Fri 10.30 - 13h, 14.30 - 18.30h Sa 10.30 - 16h www.galerie-bollhorst.de [email protected] D-79098

Augustinermuseum - Augustinerplatz T: +49-(0)761-201-2531 [email protected] www.freiburg.de/museen : Horst Kerstan - Keramik der Moderne  04.10.

Gabsheim D-55288

Keramische Werkstatt Gerald und Gotlind Weigel - Hadergasse 7 T: +49-(0)6732 - 3919 [email protected] O: Sat 19.09. - 10 - 18h, Sun 20.09. - 10 - 16h : 30. Werkstattausstellung - Gast: Beate Kuhn



D-40213 Hetjens-Museum Schulstrasse 4 T: +49-(0)211-8994210 O: Tue - Sun 11-17, Wed 11 - 21h www.duesseldorf.de/hetjens : CHINA CONTEMPORARY -  08.11.

Duingen



D-31089 Töpfermuseum Duingen Töpferstraße 8 T: +49-(0)170-7069219 O: Wed 15 17h, Sun 14-18h www.toepfermuseum-duingen.de : Guido Sengle - 11.10. - 10.01.2016

Eckernförde

D-24340 Museum Eckernförde Rathausmarkt 8 T: +49-(0)4351-712547 O: Tue - Sat 14.30 - 17h, Sun 11 - 17h On holidays 14.30 - 17h www.eckernfoerde.net [email protected]

Frankfurt/Main

D-60594 Museum für Angewandte Kunst Schaumainkai T: +49 (0)69-21234037 O: Tue + Thu to Sun 10 - 18h, Wed 10 - 20h www.museumangewandtekunst.de

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Frechen

D-50226 Stiftung KERAMION Zentrum für moderne+historische Keramik Bonnstr.12 T: +49-(0)2234-69 76 9-0 F: - 20. O: Di-Fr+So 10-17, Sa 14-17h [email protected] www.keramion.de

: Ausstellung: Frechener Keramikpreis 2015

Eröffnung, Preisverleihung und Bekanntgabe der Preisträger am 29.10. um 19 Uhr : Ausstellung: Ist Porzellan auch Keramik?10.1.2016 : Workshops für Kinder und Erwachsene 5. bis 16.10.2015 : Familientag von 11 bis 16 Uhr 25.10.2015 : Öffentliche Führung um 11 Uhr 6.9.+4.10.2015

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SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

O: opening time | T: Telephone | F: Fax | *A and by appointment

EXHIBITIONS / GALLERIES / MUSEUMS

DATES

Lotte Reimers – Neue Keramiken Werkschau 2015 Keramiken und Begleitheft mit 31 ganzseitigen Farbabbildungen

5.–27. September 2015 Eröffung: Samstag, 5. September um 16 Uhr täglich 14–18 Uhr Stadtmauergasse 17, 67146 Deidesheim SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

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DATES

EXHIBITIONS / GALLERIES / MUSEUMS

: special exhibition

| V: vernissage | Fi: finissage |  end of the exhibition

HOrst Kerstan Keramik der Moderne

29. August - 4. Oktober 2015

20. Juni bis 4. Oktober www.freiburg.de/museen 150521_MUFR_AZ_Neue_Keramik_190x124_4c_RZ.indd 1

Gelsenkirchen D-45894

22.05.15 13:54

Galerie Jutta Idelmann - Cranger Straße 36 T: +49-(0)209-595905 www.idelmann.eu [email protected] O: Do + Fr 16 - 19 u. Sa 14 - 16h *A : Elke Sada / Emil Heger - 06.09. - 18.10. V: 05.09., 17h

Rebecca Maeder mit Camille Hagner und Richard Jurtitsch G A L E R I E F Ü R G E G E N WA RT S KUNST ELFI BOHRER

Genf CH-1202 Musée Ariana - Musée suisse de la céramique et du verre Avenue de la Paix 10 T: +41-(0)2241854-55 F: - 51 O: Tue - Sun 10 -18h www.ville-ge.ch/ariana; [email protected] : "Luxury, Peace and Pleasure" - Swissceramics Competition -  01.11. : "Harmony in Glass" - Anna Dickinson -  01.11. : "CALLIOPE" - Jürgen Partenheimer - 20.11. - 20.03.2016 - V: 19.11.

Gmunden A-4810 Galerie im K.-Hof, Kammerhof Museum Gmunden

Burgwies 2 und Dorfstrasse 13 CH-8906 Bonstetten Telefon +41 (44) 700 32 10 www.ggbohrer.ch - [email protected] Do + Fr 14 – 18, Sa + So 13 – 17 Kunst 15 Zürich- ABB Halle 550 Zürich-Oerlikon 29. Oktober bis 1. November 2015 weitere Informationen unter ggbohrer.ch, AKTUELL und SHOWS

O: Wed- Sun 10 - 17h first Wed. in the month 10 - 21h

: Keramik Europas - 13. Westerwaldpreis (Auswahl) 28.08. - 26.09. - V: 28.08., 19.30h

Göttingen D-37075 Galerie Rosenhauer Konrad-Adenauer-Straße 34 T: +49-(0)551-2052100 F: 0551-25421 www.galerie-rosenhauer.de O: (during exhibitions) Wed, Fri, Sat 15.30 - 18.30 Sun 11.30 - 13 + 15 - 18h

Hameln D-31785 Keramikgalerie Faita Alte Marktstraße 45 T: +49-(0)5151-959133 F: -821294 www.keramik-galerie-faita.de [email protected] O: Mon - Fri 10 - 13 u. 15 - 18, Sat 10 - 16h *A : "Kontrast - schwarz/weiß" Jutta Albert, Porzellan - Gefäße und Objekte 17.10. - 14.11. V: 17.10., 15 - 19h

Hannover

D-30175 Handwerksform Hannover Berliner Allee 17 T: +49-(0)511-34859 F: -88 www.hwk-hannover.de O: Tue - Fri 11 - 18, Sat 11 - 14h

Heidelberg D-69117 Galerie Marianne Heller Fried­rich-Ebert-Anlage 2 Am Stadtgarten T: +49-(0)6221-619090 [email protected] www.galerie-heller.de O: Tue - Fri 11 - 13 a. 14 - 18h, Sat 11 - 18h : "Zwischen Prag und Budweis" - Pavel Drda, Elzbieta Grosseová, Ji í Lastovi ka, Tomás Proll, Eva Slaviková & Gast; Tschechien -  20.09. : "Japan zu Gast" - Arbeiten japanischer Künstler in Kooperation mit der Yufuku Gallery, Toko - 11.10. - 22.11. : "Fabelhaftes" - Tierplastiken der schottischen Künstlerin Susan O`Bryne 06.12. - Mitte Januar 2016

Herbertingen-Marbach D-88518 moosgrün - raum für zeitgenössische Keramik - Moosheimerstraße 11/1 T: +49-(0)7586-5378 [email protected] O: Tue - Fri 16 - 19h, Sat 10 - 16h

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Hirschburg

D-18311 Black Box Galerie Zum Wallbach 15 T: +49 (0)1623 3766 757, O: Tue - Sat 11-17h www.kunsthof-hirschburg.de : Lotte Buch / Keramische Objekte und Christin Wilcken / Malerei -  31.10. : Podiumsgespräch zum Thema Improvisation mit beiden Künstlerinnen und dem Jazzmusiker Philipp Rückert, anschließend Jazzkonzert mit dem Philipp Rückert Quartett - 26.09., 17h

Hohenberg

a.d.Eger D-95691 Porzellanikon - Staatliches Museum für Porzellan Hohenberg a.d. Eger/Selb Schirndinger Straße 48. T: +49 (0)9233 772211, O: Tue - Sun 10-17h www.porzellanikon.org [email protected]

Höhr-Grenzhausen D-56203

Keramikmuseum Westerwald Lindenstraße 13 T: +49-(0)2624-9460-10 F: -120 O: Tue - Sun 10 - 17h *A www.keramikmuseum.de [email protected] : "fifty/fifty/fulby" - Hans und Birgitte Börjeson -  20.09. : "Das Dorf" - Instalation von Thomas Weber - 20.09. - 03.01.2016 V: 20.09., 11.30h : "keramoVIEL" - Sammlung Hannelore Seiffert - 04.10. - 15.11 V: 04.10., 11.30h D-56203

KASINO – KERAMIKKULTUR Galerie – Laden – Werkstatt – Café Werkstatt + Ausstellung Sandra Nitz - Nicole Thoss Kasinostrasse 7 T: +49 2624 94 16 99 0 O: Tue - Fri 14 – 18h Sat 10 - 18h Sun 11 - 18h www.kultur-kasino.de Gäste-Galerie: Vladimir Groh & Yasuyo Nishida (Porzellan), Milan Pekar (Kristallglasur), Nela Trésková (Porzellan), Markéta Drzmisková (Porzellan), Lenka Sérová Maliská (Porzellan), Anna Polanská (Glas), Lada Semecká (Glas) Gäste-Laden: Juliane Herden, Judith Radl, Nika Stupica, Martin Möhwald, Elke Sada, Cornelius Reer, Susanne Petzold, Jutta Becker, Clarissa Capelle : SOMMERGÄSTE - Porzellan und Glas aus Tschechien -  25.10.

NEW CERAMICS

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

O: opening time | T: Telephone | F: Fax | *A and by appointment

DATES

EXHIBITIONS / GALLERIES / MUSEUMS Langerwehe D-52379

EN RIC MESTRE Un monde à part

Töpfereimuseum Langerwehe Pastoratsweg 1 T: +49-(0)2423–44 46 F: -59 90. O: Fri 10 - 13 u. 14 - 18h, Sat 12 - 17h, Sun + holidays 11 - 18h www.toepfereimuseum.de [email protected] : "Auf dem Wege"- Grenzgänge der Kunst. Künstlerinnen der GEDOK Bonn. Zu Gast: Ekaterina Ominina, Keramikerin aus St.Petersburg - 03.10.2015 - 13.03.2016

Le Don du Fel

F-12140 GALERIE DU DON - 12140 Le Fel T: +33 05 65 54 15 15 www.ledondufel.com : "UN MONDE À PART" - Enric Mestre -  08.10.

Leipzig

D-04103 Grassi­museum Museum für Angewandte Kunst Johannisplatz 5-11 T: +49-(0)341-22 29 100 www.grassimuseum.de O: Tue - Sun 10 - 18, Wed + Thu 10 - 20h : EXOTIK / VERFÜHRUNG / GLAMOUR - Die Weltmarke Goldschneider -  11.10.

DU 23 AOÛT AU 8 OCTOBRE 2015

Keramikgalerie terra rossa Roßplatz 12 T/F: +49-(0)341-9904399 O: Mon - Fri 10 - 18, Sat 11 - 15h [email protected] www.terra-rossa-leipzig.de : Rauchbrandkeramik von Imke Splittgerber - 01.09. - 09.10., V: 01.09.., 18.30h : "Vielschichtig" - Unikatkeramik von Petra Bittl - Gefäße und Wandgestaltungen 13.10. - 21.11. - V: 13.10., 18h D-04103

Margraten

NL-6269 VE Galerie & Atelier - Groot Welsden 48 T: +31-43-4582751 F: -4583029 O: Wed, Sat + Sun 13 - 17h *A www.keramiek-grootwelsden.nl

GALERIE DU DON

München

D-80333 Galerie für Angewandte Kunst Pacellistraße 6-8 T: +49-(0)89-290147-0 www.kunsthandwerk-bkv.de O: Mon - Sat 10 - 18h

CÉRAMIQUE C ON T E MP O R A IN E

GALERIE DU DON, 12140 LE FEL, FRANCE www.ledondufel.com

Hüfingen

D-78183 24. Int. Keramikwochen Hüfingen 12 until 27 September O: 12./13. September 10-17h, Sun 20. and Sun 27. September 14-17h u.n.V. T: +49 (0)771-600924 Informationen: www.huefingen.de : Museum der Stadt Hüfingen, Nikolausgässchen: Keramik von Sonngard Marcks und Juliane Herden : Rathausgalerie u. Rathausfoyer, Hauptstr. 18: Keramik von Renée Reichenbach : Vernissage im Rathaus Hüfingen: Fri 11 September, 19h mit Dr. Walter Lokau

GALERIE

Johannesberg D-63867

Galerie Handwerk Max-Joseph-Straße 4 T: +49-(0)89-5119296 O: Tue, Wed, Fri 10 - 18h, Thu 10 - 20h, Sat 10 - 13h closed at holidays www.hwk-muenchen.fr/galerie : "Belgie, Begique, Belgien, Belgium" - 36 belgische Gestalter aus den Bereichen Glas, Keramik, Metall, Buchgestaltung und Einbandkunst, Textil & Schmuck 08.09. -10.10., V: 08.09., 18.30h D-80333

Münster

D-48163 Kunsthaus Kannen Alexianerweg 9 T: +49-(0)2501-966 20 560 www.kunsthaus-kannen.de [email protected] O: Tue - Sun 13 - 17h

Raeren

B-4730 Töpfereimuseum Raeren Bergstraße 103 T: +32-(0)87-850 903 O: Tue - Sun 10 - 17h www.toepfereimuseum.org - Exhibition in Haus Zahlepohl opposite the castle

Galerie Metzger Hauptstraße 18 T: +49-(0)6021-460224 O: Wed 15 - 19, Sat 15 - 17 Sun 11 - 17h open only during exhibitions *A [email protected] www.galerie-metzger.de : Ausstellung der Gruppe 83 - 25.10. - 15.11.

Römhild D-98631 Schloss Glücksburg

Karlsruhe D-76131 Staatliche Majolika Manufaktur Karlsruhe GmbH -

Rostock D-18055 Galerie Klosterformat

METZGER

Ahaweg 6-8 T: +49-(0)721-91 237 70 O: Mon - Fri 8 - 16h

Kellinghusen

D-25548 Museum Kellinghusen - Hauptstraße 18 T: +49-(0)4822-3762-10 F: -15 O: Thu - Sun 14 - 17h *A [email protected] : "Cathy Fleckstein - Im Laufe der Zeit - Au fil du temps" -  06.09.

Köln

D-50667

Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln An der Rechtschule T: +49-(0)221-221 23860 O: Tue - Sun 11 - 17h, 1. Thu in the month 11 - 22h [email protected] www.makk.de

Kopenhagen

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

DK-2000 Fredericsberg

COPENHAGEN CERAMICS - Smallegade 48

NEW CERAMICS 

Griebelstraße 28 T: +49-(0)36948-80140 F: -88122 O: Tue - Fri 10 - 12 + 13 - 16h, Sat + Sun 13 - 17h [email protected]

Klosterhof 5 T: +49-(0)381-5108577 F: -510 85 90 O: Tue - Sat 11 - 18 h [email protected] www.klosterformat.de : "Sommer-TRIO XII" - Pauline Ullrich, Plastik - Rosemarie Ullrich, Schmuck Klaus Ullrich, Malerei -  19.09.

Rheinsberg D-16831 KERAMIK HAUS RHEINSBERG Rhinstraße 1 T: +49 (0)33931-34156, O: daily 10 - 18 h, also sun- and holydays : "Der Kanne neue Kleider" - europäische Keramiker gestalten die berühmte Rheinsberger Teekanne - bis 31.12. : 26. VERKAUFSAUSSTELLUNG: "100 schönste Tassen" - Unikate von Karl Fulle und Freunde - ab 10.10. : JAHRES-AUSSTELLUNG: Jahresbecher "Rheinsberg 2015" limitierte Sammler-Edition von Pep Gomez, Frankreich, bis 31.12.

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DATES

EXHIBITIONS / GALLERIES / MUSEUMS

: special exhibition

Velten

Fichtestraße Gallery Rheinsberg,1a Germany Trelissick Newlyn Art Gallery

Studio, Anna Sykora –Cornwall, May UK 2016 Berlin, Germany AprCornwall, UK 2. Oct 2015 FichtestraßeStudio, 1a Anna Sykora Trelissick Gallery Apr – May 2016 Fichtestraße 1a Cornwall, Trelissick Gallery Berlin, Germany UK

TEACUPS TEACUPS Berlin to Cornwall TEACUPS Cornwall, UK

Berlin to Cornwall

Berlin to Cornwall Anna Sykora Anna Sykora Deborah Prosser Deborah Prosser

Weiden/Oberpf.

D-92637 Internationales Keramik-Museum Zweigmuseum der Neuen Sammlung München, Luitpoldstraße 25 T: +49 (0)961-32020 O: Tue - Sun 10 - 12.30 + 14 - 16,30 *A www.die-neue-sammlung.de [email protected] Permanent: Highlights of world ceramics from the museums in Bavaria + contributions from the porcelain industry in Weiden

Westerstede

D-26655

Galerie Belinda Berger Mühlenbrink 17 T: +49-(0)4488-525391 F: -525392 www.belindaberger.de O: Sat + Sun 16 - 18h *A Permanent exhibition of gallery artists

Winterthur

CH-8400 Atelier-Galerie raku-art Evi Kienast Tösstalstraße 14 O: Thu - Fri 14 - 18h, Sat 11 - 15h Kontakt und Infos: www.raku-art.ch

Anna Sykora Deborah Prosser Sarreguemines Rödental

Winzer/Flintsbach D-94577 Ziegel + Kalk Museum

D-18055 Europäisches Museum für Modernes Glas Schloss Roseau O: daily 9:30 - 13h and 13:30 - 17h F-57200



D-16727 Ofen- und Keramikmuseum Velten Wilhelmstraße 32 T: +49-(0)3304-31760 F: -505887. www.ofenmuseum-velten.de [email protected] O: Tue - Fri 11 - 17, Sat + Sun 13 - 17h

19. Sept 2015 10. Oct 2015 –– 19. Sept 2015 10. Oct 2015 Rhinpassagen 2016 Rhinpassagen 10. 10. JanJan2016 Rheinsberg, Germany Newlyn Art Gallery Rheinsberg,2.19. Germany Newlyn Art UK Gallery Cornwall, Oct 2015 Sept 2015 10. Oct 2015 – Cornwall, UK Studio, Anna Sykora Apr May 2016 Rhinpassagen 10.–Jan 2016 2. Oct 2015

Berlin, Germany

| V: vernissage | Fi: finissage |  end of the exhibition

Museumstraße 2 12. T: +49 (0)9901-9357-0, O: 1st + 2nd Saturday in month & Sun- and Holidays 13 - 17 h

Musée de la Faience 15/17 rue Poincaré

Selb

D-95100 Porzellanikon Selb Staatliches Museum für Porzellan Hohenberg a.d. Eger/Selb Werner-Schürer-Platz 1 T: +49-(0)9287-9180-00 F: -30 [email protected] www.porzellanikon.org O: Tue - Sun 10 - 17h : "Ceramics and its Dimension" - European cultural Lifestyle in ceramics  15.11.

Staufen

D-79219 Keramikmuseum Staufen Wettelbrunnerstraße 3 O: Wed - Sat 14 - 17h, Sun 11 - 13 and 14 - 17h and 14 - 17h and 14 - 17h www.keramikmuseum-staufen.de : "Tee und Blätter - Die Kunst des Raku - Nani Champy-Schott -  04.10.

Schleswig

D-74837 Schloss Gottorf - Schlossinsel 1 T: +49-(0)4621-813222 [email protected] www.schloss-gottorf.de

Stuttgart

D-70176 Kunst im Hinterhaus Breitscheidstraße 131 A www.kunst-im-hinterhaus.de T: +49-(0)711 - 695649

St. Wendel

66606 Galerie-Atelier No4 Nik. Obertreis Straße 4 T/F: +49 (0)49151-414 083 83 O: Tue - Sat 14 - 19h www.barbaraluetjens.de

Solothurn CH-4500 Galerie Christoph Abbühl und Kunstforum Solothurn

Visitenkarte_BL_A_No4_RZSonderfarbe.indd 1

Schaalgasse 9 T/F: +41-(0)32 621 38 58 O: Thu + Fri 15 - 19h, Sat 14 - 17h *A : "zwei und zwei" - Doris Kaiser und Michael Cleff -  19.09. NL-5932 AG Keramikcentrum Tiendschuur Tegelen Pottenbakkersmuseum. Kasteellaan 8 T: +31-(0)77-3260213 F: -3260214 O: Tue - Sun 14 - 17h www.tiendschuur.net [email protected]

Visitenkarte_BL_A_No4_RZSonderfarbe.indd 1

Tegelen

18.07.14 19:51

18.07.14 19:51

Thurnau

D-95349 Töpfermuseum Thurnau Kirchplatz 12 www.toepfermuseum-thurnau.de [email protected] O: April-Sept.: Tue - Fri 14 - 17h, Sat, Sun and holidays 11-17h, October - 6.January and March: Sat 13 - 16h, Sun and holidays 11-18h

Trebsen

D-04687 Galerie Schloß Altenhain Neuweißenborner Straße 20 www.schloss-altenhain.de/galerie

GALERIE KLOSTERFORMAT J.Lamberz, Klosterhof 5, 18055 Rostock (0049)381 5108577 / [email protected]

grassi

www.klosterformat.de

Sommer-TRIO XII Pauline Ullrich-Rosemarie-Ullrich-Klaus Ullrich

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NEW CERAMICS

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015

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La Fondation Bruckner remercie l’ensemble des acteurs impliqués dans l’organisation et le déroulement du Parcours Céramique Carougeois : les artistes, les galeries et arcades artisanales, les musées, les services municipaux de la Ville de Carouge, la Galerie Maria Lund Paris, la Galerie NL=US Art Rotterdam, la Galerie de l’Ancienne Poste Toucy, Imura Art Gallery Tokyo/Kyoto, Michel Gouéry, Marit Tingleff, ainsi que les nombreux bénévoles et aides.

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75

IMPRINT

PROFILES

PREVIEW: ISSUE 6–2015

EXHIBITIONS and PROJECTS

GALLERIES FORUM KNOWLEDGE & SKILLS

COURSES / SEMINARS / MARKETS

– published in the first week of November

OUTLOOK

1 NONA OTARASHVILI was born in Tbilisi (Georgia) and graduated as a ceramic designer at the State School of Fine Art in 2001. From 1996 1998, she studied at Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg, Germany. In 2001, she took over the ceramics course studio at the FABRIK e.V. in Freiburg, which she still runs today with Annette Schwarte. She has also been a guest lecturer at the State School of Fine Art in Tblisi since 2006. Ethnologist Ina Zimmermann gives us an insight into the work of this artist, who commutes between Germany and Georgia.

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2 RAY MEEKER initially studied architecture at the University of Southern California and changed in his fifth year to ceramics. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree. He also met his future wife Deborah Smith there. After following different career paths, they met again in Pondicherry, India, in 1970 and in 1971, they set up the now world famous Golden Bridge Pottery together. Ray is one of the most widely recognised ceramists in India, exhibiting his work internationally. We will be publishing an interesting review of his life and work.

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MARIA GESZLER-GARZULY was the artist in residence at the Arctic Ceramic Centre in Posio, Finland, in March and April 2015, the most northerly ceramics centre in the world. When I heard of her plans, I asked her to send us a report on her activities after her return from the “frozen wastes”. You can read her report in the coming issue. ... and • THE NEWS • more ARTISTS’ PROFILES • FORUM • EXHIBITION REVIEWS • latest news from the GALLERIES and MUSEUMS • KNOWLEDGE & SKILLS and much, much more ...

NEW CERAMICS: ISSN 1860 - 1049 Verlag Neue Keramik GmbH | Steinreuschweg 2 D-56203 Höhr-Grenzhausen | Germany TEL.: +49 - (0)2624 - 948068 | FAX: - 948071 [email protected] www.neue-keramik.de | www.ceramics.de Publisher: Bernd Pfannkuche Managing director and editor: Bernd Pfannkuche Advertisements: [email protected] TEL.: +49-(0)2624-948068 | FAX: - 948071 Subscriptions: Leserservice NEUE KERAMIK Postfach 81 05 80 | D-70522 Stuttgart Tel.: +49 (0)711-7252-259 (Monday-Friday 08 am to 06 pm) Fax: +49 (0)711-7252-399 | [email protected] Readers’ questions and communication: Gustav Weiß TEL.: +49-(0)30-84109218 [email protected] Accounts: Ramona May | TEL.: +49-(0)6224-921018 Translations: Erban Translations, Paul Simon Heyduck Bernd Pfannkuche Scans and image processing: Huriye Hallac Layout: Bernd Pfannkuche, Huriye Hallac

Printed by Arnold, Am Wall 15 im GVZ, 14979 Großbeeren, Germany Whilst every care is taken with material submitted, no responsibility can be accepted by Neue Keramik - New Ceramics for accidental loss or damage. Unsolicited material can only be returned if provided with a stamped addressed envelope. All uncredited photographs are private property. Copyright © by Bernd Pfannkuche, Höhr-Grenzhausen, Germany. All right reserved. NEW CERAMICS is published six times a year. Subscriptions (6 issues) incl. postage and packing: World: surface mail E 53,- | US$ 69,- | £ 42,World: airmail E 66.- | US$ 86,- | £ 52,Subscriptions not cancelled at least two months before the end of the current subscription period will automatically be renewed. No refunds of subscriptions will be granted in case of circumstances beyond our control. Price of single copy: E 10.00. US $ 12.00. £ 7.50 Postage is calculated individually for single copies

Advertising price list from 1 Jan. 2010, enquiries to NEW CERAMICS or on www.neue-keramik.de We have special rates for students. See subscript. cards Bank details: POSTBANK BERLIN: SORTCODE 100 100 10 a/c 661 704 104 IBAN: DE21 1001 0010 0661 7041 04 | BIC: PBNKDEFF DEUTSCHE BANK BERLIN: SORT CODE 100 700 00 a/c 0161 190 IBAN: DE55 1007 0000 0016 1190 00 | BIC: DEUTDEBB SCHWEIZER BANKGESELLSCHAFT: UBS, a/c 246-341.220.08 V IBAN: CH82 0024 6246 3412 2008V BIC: UBSWCHZH80A BANK AUSTRIA / ÖSTERREICH: IBAN: AT55 1200 0515 6400 7829 | BIC: BKAUATWW We make every effort to present correctly any information provided to us. However, we cannot give any guarantee or accept any responsibility for its correctness.

Internationaler Keramikmarkt MILSBEEK

Keramisto 2015 Thema: Tee & Keramik

19 en 20 september 2015 De mookerplas, Plasmolen

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Kleve Venlo

Artist: Fritz Roßmann

PORCELAIN: transparent ART

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