Undergrowth is on view at County Hall Pottery, London

January 13 – March 8, 2026

County Hall Pottery is pleased to announce Undergrowth, a group exhibition exploring the rich metaphorical and material potential of the ecological layer that exists beneath taller plants and trees. Bringing together ceramic and metal works in a tactile, multi-dimensional installation, the exhibition considers undergrowth as both a biological system and a metaphor for the hidden forces that quietly shape our world.

In ecological terms, undergrowth is vital to biodiversity: it provides shelter and nourishment for wildlife and plays a crucial role in decomposition and nutrient recycling. Metaphorically, it represents the often overlooked strata of existence – ideas, processes and systems that operate beneath the surface, subtly but profoundly influencing their surroundings.

Undergrowth unfolds across wall, floor and plinth-based works, forming an immersive landscape that visitors can navigate from multiple viewpoints. Some pieces evoke an “earth layer,” potentially incorporating metal grids that allow sightlines above and below, drawing attention to what is visible and what is concealed. The pairing of ceramics and metal creates a striking contrast between organic and industrial materials, foregrounding texture, weight and tactility.

Viewers are invited to engage slowly and attentively, encountering the work from different angles and depths. The installation proposes a space that feels interconnected and evolving, encouraging reflection on the unseen structures – ecological, material and conceptual – that underpin both the artworks and the wider environment.

Exhibited artists: Elizabeth Jackson, Emily Stapleton Jefferis, Jo Pearl, Lisa Hellrup, Meichen Chen, Mingshu Li, Raphael Emine, Safia Hijos, Sisse Holst Pedersen
Curated by Elizabeth Jackson and Emily Stapleton Jefferis

Contact
gallery@countyhallpottery.com

County Hall Pottery
County Hall, Belvedere Road
SE1 7GP London
United Kingdom

Photos courtesy of the gallery

HOMO CERAMICUS is on view at the Gyeonggi Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Icheon

September 19, 2025 – February 22, 2026

Homo Ceramicus is a neologism first articulated by the Gyeonggi Museum of Ceramic Contemporary Art (GMoCCA). In its most literal sense, the term designates humankind that works with clay.

In this exhibition the concept is employed in a more deliberate and focused sense, referring to potters who transcend mere technical practice and who, through clay, articulate a distinctive attitude toward life and a unique spirit. By framing the exhibition in this way, we seek to illuminate the identity of potters from a multidimensional perspective and hope that audiences will encounter their existence with greater depth and empathy.

Participating Artists
Part 1. Neil Brownsword, Back Inkyo, Saito Yuna, Lim Jihyun, Tontouristen
Part 2. Kang Youngjun, Moon Chanseok, Park Miran, Park Songkuk, Shin Hyunchoul, Woo Sihyeong, Lee Heami
Part 3. Kim Woonhee, Kim Yeji, Park Sunyoung, Yang Hyejung, Lee Joonsung, Cho Younsang

List of Artists from the GMoCCA Collection on Exhibit
Kim Junmyung, Naoki Kato, Nelson Lim, David Hicks, Dyah Retno, Lana Kova, Lisa Creskey, Rika Herbst, Lindsey Dezman, Magari Kazuma, Mee-sun Kim Park, Park Songkuk, Stephanie Lanter, Takefumi Aoki, Eliza Au, Christine Yiting Wang, Irina Razumovskaya, Ley. Wang, Choi Myungjin, Kathryn Baczeski, Ke Tang, Claudi Casanovasu, Tamaki Risa

In the novel by Hwang Sunwon (1915–2000), The Old Potter (1939), the protagonist is portrayed as a figure of steadfast conviction, meticulously inspecting the pottery taken from the kiln and tolerating no flaw, however small. This image, representing a popular perception of the potter, has been shaped over a long history.

While past and present ceramists reveal considerable differences in their methods and environments, they display a remarkable continuity in their attitude toward life and in their craftsmanship. These inner commonalities are quietly and faithfully preserved within the ceramics they have created, the tangible fruits of their labor.

The GMoCCA, attentive to these similarities and continuities, seeks to illuminate the existence of the ceramist through the concept of Homo Ceramicus. Homo Ceramicus is a neologism first proposed by the GMoCCA, signifying “humanity shaped through clay.” In this exhibition, the concept is employed in a more specific sense, defined as “the ceramists who shape clay” and “those who speak through clay.” It thus designates not mere technical practitioners, but beings who possess a distinctive way of life and a singular spirit.

Through this new designation, we seek to perceive the ceramist, much like the figure in Hwang Sunwon’s novel, in a more multidimensional and profound way. Furthermore, by illuminating their identity through an analytical and multilayered lens, we hope to foster a deeper public understanding of the ceramist. We also aim to reflect upon their attitude and their practice as we live through these weary times. We are then led to pose the following question to ourselves:

“With what attitude toward life are we shaping our today?”

This exhibition is organized into three parts. Part I: Breathing Humbly highlights the cycle of clay, the destiny of ceramists who must live within that cycle, and their attitudes toward nature. Clay circulates, life that springs from it nourishes other life, and all existence ultimately returns to it. Within this principle of circulation, humanity has long revered clay as sacred. From the Bible, Sumerian and Greek mythology, and Native American beliefs to Korea’s agrarian traditions, clay has been honored as the very origin of creation and of life. In ancient Greece, Keramos was venerated as the god of pottery and became the very root of the word “ceramic.” Pottery itself was at times regarded as an act akin to divine power.

Contemporary ceramists likewise carry forward this tradition. They immerse themselves in the material of clay and the process of creation, finding wonder in moments of unpredictability. The practice of ceramics is deeply conditioned by natural forces such as temperature, humidity, fire, and wind and is imbued with variables that cannot be controlled by human will alone. Confronted with these limits, ceramists yield to a force beyond the self and approach their work with humility.

The video artwork of Tontouristen, which reveals such aspects of the ceramist, recalls the naturalness and materiality inherent in ceramics. It also reminds us that the ceramist, within such a landscape, is a being who contemplates deeply on the themes of human intervention and the restoration of nature. Neil Brownsword, in turn, conveys the identity of the ceramist through an elemental approach of engaging clay and laboring repetitively. Lim Jihyun, as an artist who works with the material of clay, introduces experimental artworks that present perceptions of both the digital world and the material world. Back Inkyo, through large-scale installations, embodies the enduring ceramist’s spirit of inquiry that embraces even failure. Saito Yuna discloses the vision of the ceramist who does not see nature as separate from the self but as an existence that enfolds the artist.

Together, these artists’ humility, which drives them to accept themselves as part of nature’s order and attune to its subtle changes as they continue their work, evokes the distant past when humanity encountered the world as something sacred. Even today, ceramics remain a mode of creation in which human beings engage the world in its deepest essence.

Part II: Enduring and Healing illuminates the attitude of ceramists who, while enduring the arduous processes of their craft, personify the Korean concept of 玩物趣味wanmulchwimi (a contemplative passion for objects) by drinking tea, creating and handling objects, and repeatedly indulging in them as a mode of both practice and meditation. Within this space, tea utensils and objects that represent such qualities are displayed. These artworks move beyond the notion of mere drinking vessels or decorative items, carrying instead the significance of ceramics as a medium for the ceramist’s self-cultivation and healing.

For the ceramist, the act of drinking tea is regarded not merely as simply imbibing something, but as a ritual that encompasses life and work, as well as materiality and spirituality. By raising a teacup they have crafted, bringing to their lips the tea within, and savoring it slowly, they reawaken through the body the texture, weight, balance, warmth, and flow of the ceramic, sensuously experiencing their own artwork anew.

It is, at once, a time of self-reflection and a quiet pause in which the tension and stubborn persistence felt in working with clay are momentarily set aside. In this stillness, ceramists savor the lingering resonance of contemplation, converse with themselves, and experience once more an intimate connection with nature.

Kang Youngjun, who prepared a dedicated tea room for such experiences, presents tea utensils that delicately embody a Korean sensibility laden with a touch of antiquity. Woo Sihyeong, through a process akin to spiritual practice, creates unglazed ceramic works that evoke the cycles of existence and extinction, transformation and healing.

Moon Chanseok, drawing on experience accumulated through countless failures, presents tea utensils poetically themed around the moon. Lee Heami reveals silver-glazed ceramics that are continuously transformed over the course of the user’s life. Shin Hyunchoul presents tea utensils that serve as mediums of self-cultivation and spiritual reflection. Park Miran unveils ceramic plates that reinterpret glaze along with objects imbued with the meaning of healing, while Park Songkuk introduces experimental tea utensils inspired by the motif of hanji, traditional Korean paper.

These artists’ creations are similar in that they are brought to completion through immersion, despite countless hours and repeated failures. Such an attitude involving silently conversing with clay and steadfastly walking the path solely in pursuit of beauty reveals the very essence of the ceramist.

Part III: Reflecting and Living consists of six miniature self-portraits created by contemporary ceramists, together with 24 artworks from the collection of the GMoCCA. Installed as if to guide the viewer, these figures recall Kkokdu (traditional wooden effigies), at once ornamental objects and religious symbols that served as guardians of the deceased, designed to protect and to transform the sorrow of death into solace and wit.

Kkokdu were symbolic beings that bridged the human and the transcendent, serving as mediators that transformed life and death, suffering and sorrow into consolation and humor. The self-portraits presented in this space likewise reinterpret the character of such traditional forms in a contemporary context, functioning as windows that reflect the unseen inner world of the ceramist beyond the tangible form of the artwork itself.

The artworks are organized around 喜怒哀樂huinoaerak–four fundamental emotions of human beings– allowing the viewer to observe each ceramist’s attitudes and emotions that shape their life and offering a glimpse into their inner world. 喜Hui comprises artworks that symbolize joy and the delight of creation, while 怒No brings together artworks that convey anger and frustration. 哀Ae presents artworks that symbolize loss and compassion, and 樂Rak consists of artworks that humorously unravel the complex interplay of emotions such as joy and sorrow, and hatred and despair.

Lee Joonsung presents a kkokdu object rooted in the artist’s intimate stories yet steeped in emotions and narratives that resonate with all hearts. Kim Yeji reveals her identity as a ceramist who views the world from a distinctive perspective through objects that dramatically embody inner emotions.

Park Sunyoung expresses in clay the love and stress she has experienced while raising two children, exploring the balance between art, life, and motherhood. Kim Woonhee introduces a kkokdu object of a simple form, accented by witty expressions and endearing attire. Yang Hyejung presents modest, endearing “kkokdu” objects that evoke an unspoiled childhood.

Cho Younsang introduces an artwork that embodies reflections on human society through drawings that carry a tactile presence, raising philosophical questions about human existence.

These artists’ works reveal the ceramist as one who unfolds stories through clay. Clay is not merely a material for shaping form; for the ceramist, it is a tool for shaping a personal philosophy, a mirror linking inner emotion and the outer world, and ultimately a medium that ceaselessly questions the very origin of existence.

In this sense, Homo Ceramicus presents artworks that reveal the identity of ceramists who contemplate the cycles of life within the order of nature, endure human limitations, and personify their immersion in practice alongside the pursuit of technical perfection. This exhibition also shares with the viewer the everyday lives of ceramists who handle clay as though they were engaging in daily self-cultivation, laying bare their attitudes toward life itself.

Furthermore, the exhibition extends beyond merely displaying artworks to convey the following messages:

“Clay becomes true ceramic only after being tried by fire.”

“A broken vessel is not a failure but a passage that must be passed through.”

“Even when the flame of the kiln falters in the rain, the ceramist rekindles the fire and continues the work in silence.”

Ceramists understand that failure is not an end but a part of growth, and that each moment is precious and fleeting. This truth extends to all of us, for it is through trials that we become stronger and discover the opportunity to begin again. Through these messages, which are subtly hidden within the exhibition, we hope that the question posed to each viewer in the prologue, “With what attitude toward life are we shaping our today?,” will reveal an answer tempered with the strength of affirmation.

Contact
contact@gmocca.org

Gyeonggi Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art
263, Gyeongchungdae-ro 2697 Beon-gil, Icheon-si,
Gyeonggi-do Province, 17379
Republic of Korea

Photos courtesy of Gyeonggi Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art

Altered States: Anne Marie Laureys and Costanza Gastaldi is on view at Taste Contemporary, Geneva

November 13, 2025 – January 14, 2026

Taste Contemporary is proud to present Altered States, a two-person exhibition of new work by Anne Marie Laureys and Costanza Gastaldi.

Anne Marie Laureys’ clay sculptures begin their journey as thrown pots, but while the material is still soft, it is pushed, kneaded and reshaped into new bodies. As the final form emerges, traces of touch still remain visible; clay turning into skin as vessels spiral and fold back on themselves. Her forms carry the memory of hand and movement. Never fixed, they are always becoming. Costanza Gastaldi’s images reject the accuracy of form, but question the resistance and plasticity of reality. Jellyfish appear not as motifs, but as suspended bodies, a contact between the living and the formless. Tangible, yet elusive, her photographs, created employing both analogue and heliogravure print processes, capture a state between memory and perception, between presence and disappearance.

In the exhibition Altered States, ideas within both practices are brought into dialogue with each other as each artist invites us into a space where forms are fluid, unstable, and metamorphic. The exhibition evokes a condition in which bodies and images appear still, yet remain intensely alive, as if caught in a state of constant inner motion. Sculptures and images appear still, yet remain intensely alive, as we enter a world where matter is shifting, dissolving, and is perpetually remade. Anne Marie Laureys’ vessels are recognizable and strange at the same time. Like nocturnal visions, they follow a kind of dream logic, while Costanza Gastaldi’s images exist in a place where the boundaries between perception, sensation and memory dissolve. Matter in Motion is accompanied by an original sound creation by composer and DJ Luigi Tozzi. Known for his atmospheric compositions, his sound intervention acts as a liquid echo, particularly for Costanza Gastaldi’s images; it follows their rhythms, prolongs their silences, and reveals their subterranean dimension.

About Anne Marie Laureys
Anne Marie Laureys thinks of her ceramics as metaphors for feelings. She starts the process by throwing a classic, symmetrical pot. While the clay is still soft and wet, she pulls, folds, pinches and punctures it. The tension of the clay underneath her fingers dictates the way the folds take shape. Her pieces have a spontaneous, unplanned quality but in reality, she takes her time to find the shape of a vessel, remoulding and refolding the clay over and over again until it speaks in her unique voice. No two works are ever the same. Her ceramics are renowned for their sense of excitement, freshness, and tactility.

Anne Marie studied at LUCA School of Arts, Ghent. Her work can be found in private collections internationally and are included in the official collections of the Province of Hainaut, Belgium, The Taipei county Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan, The Arts and Crafts Museum of Shanghai, China, the Keramikmuseum, Westerwald, Germany and most recently, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida, USA. Anne Marie Laureys lives and works in Belgium.

Contact
info@tastecontemporary.com

Taste Contemporary
7, Rue du Vieux-Billard
1205, Geneva
Switzerland

Captions

• Installation views by Ruth Ward
• Images of individual works ©peterclaeysbelgium

Fiat Ignis III: Let There Be Fire is on view at Gallery 60 NYC, New York

December 6-27, 2025

Fiat Ignis III: Let There Be Fire is a group exhibition shaped as much by process as by outcome.

Hosted by Gallery 60 NYC in collaboration with the New England Wood Firing Conference, the show brings together twelve ceramic artists whose works emerge from the shared intensity of wood firing—an approach defined by time, presence, and unpredictability.

Wood firing is a slow and demanding practice. Over many days and nights, a kiln is fed continuously with wood, allowing flame, ash, and heat to move freely across the surfaces of the work. No two pieces come out the same. Each carries marks that cannot be fully planned or reproduced, recording both intention and chance, control and surrender. The results are varied: subtle shifts in surface, bold ash deposits, moments of roughness, quiet softness, or unexpected beauty.

Entering the gallery, the first impression is one of quiet attention. The works do not rush toward the viewer; instead, they invite a slower pace to move around, pause, and look closely. Many of the pieces carry a strong sense of touch. Surfaces hold marks of the hand, traces of pressure and repetition. Some forms feel dense and grounded, while others appear lighter, almost tentative. As the viewer moves through the space, these contrasts become more noticeable and the differences are felt immediately.

Rather than presenting a single narrative, the exhibition offers a series of encounters. Some works lean toward functional forms while others move more freely into sculptural expressions. Rather than opposing one another, function and aesthetics exist side by side, each informing the other. A cup, a jar, or a sculptural form all hold the same evidence of fire, material, touch, and attention. From a distance, there is a sense of rhythm and balance; up close, surfaces reveal layers of decision, accident, and response. Weight and fragility sit next to one another; natural, organic effects sit alongside deliberate gestures of the human hand; pieces are given space. Each work seems to carry its own mood and pace, yet together they create a gentle cohesion.

Time is present everywhere in the work—not only in the long firing process, but in the accumulated knowledge, patience, and dedication behind each piece. The surfaces feel lived-in rather than finished, as if they continue to hold memory and dream. For some artists, this aligns closely with ideas found in traditions such as wabi-sabi, where imperfection, impermanence, and even brokenness are understood as part of continuity rather than flaws to be corrected. What remains visible is not perfection, but honesty.

Although each artist brings a distinct energy and approach, the exhibition resists hierarchy. Fiat Ignis III is not about individual achievement so much as shared experience. Wood firing depends on cooperation—people working in shifts, tending the fire, responding together to what the kiln asks for. That sense of working alongside one another carries into the exhibition. The works feel connected, not because they look alike, but because they come from a common effort.

The participating artists—Pascal Chmelar, Gabriel Cordero, Dan Christoffel, Claire Engelhardt, Yuri Gershtein, Mandy Henson, Shinobu Habauchi, Frank Olt, Brendan Shanahan, Kiichi Takeuchi, Riley Walzer, and Trevor Youngberg—form a diverse group, each contributing a personal voice while remaining part of a larger whole. Differences are not smoothed over; they are celebrated. The exhibition holds a wide range of tempos, textures, and intentions, allowing individuality to exist comfortably within a shared ground.

Fiat Ignis III: Let There Be Fire feels less like a statement and more like a gathering, moving through a communal landscape shaped by fire, labor, and trust. Working closely with Kiichi Takeuchi, Director of Gallery 60 NYC, we were ourselves fascinated by how these ceramics inhibit the space: how they occupy the room, how they ask to be viewed from multiple angles, how they change as the viewer moves… At its heart, the exhibition encourages slowing down, observing relationships, allowing impressions to form naturally, and remembering the quiet generosity of work made together.

Contact
gallery60nyc@gmail.com

Gallery 60 NYC
208 E 60th St
New York, NY 10022
United States

Photo credit: Bing Lu

Fernando Casasempere: Ruins is on view at Fred Levine, Bruton

November 15, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Fred Levine is excited to present Ruins, a solo exhibition with London based, Chilean artist, Fernando Casasempere. The exhibition brings together new ceramic sculptures and paintings that continue Casasempere’s long-standing exploration of time, decay, and humanity’s imprint on the natural and built environment in particular Ruins and their architectural fragments.

In Ruins, Casasempere examines the architectural fragment as both a physical and psychological relic, a trace of what once was and a catalyst for imagination. His sculptural works evoke remnants of ancient structures, using a technique that builds his sculpture from blocks or bricks that reference the continuity of human construction and the erosion of civilization over time. Alongside these, a series of Salares paintings investigates the marks, or scars that nature leaves through its own processes of transformation and regeneration.

Casasempere describes his enduring fascination with ruins as something that exists “in my own collective unconscious.” From early encounters with the monumental cities and temples of his youth, it was not the perfection of architecture that endured in his memory, but the incompleteness of what remained and abandoned fragments are what inspire him to reconstruct personal histories of place and time.

Through this exhibition, Casasempere brings these impressions into physical form, working within ceramics’ full expressive potential, from raw material to refined structure, from permanence to fragility. His practice invites reflection on what persists and what fades, and how human and natural forces intertwine to shape the landscapes we inhabit.

About Fernando Casasempere
Casasempere has exhibited extensively in the UK, Chile, North America, Japan and Europe and is renowned for monumental installations including the critically acclaimed Out of Sync at Somerset House, London (2012) – which inspired Paul Cummins’s and Tom Piper’s WWI commemorative centenary installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at Tower of London (2014) – and Back to the Earth at New Art Centre, Salisbury (2005). Forthcoming commissions (2021) include permanent works near London’s Tottenham Court Road Station (Derwent) and at Henrietta House (CBRE).

Forthcoming and selected solo exhibitions include: New Art Centre, Reino Unido (2024); Francis Gallery, Los Ángeles (2024); Galería Artespacio, Chile (2024) Galería Helene Aziza, París (2024). Bloomberg Space, London ( 2022 )the San Diego Museum of Art (2022), Casa América, Madrid (2020), Ivorypress Gallery, Madrid (2019), Parafin Gallery, London (2018), Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2017), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile (2016), Parafin, London (2015), Somerset House, London (2012), and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Chile (2012).

Selected group exhibitions include: Museum of Royal Worcester, Worcester (2018), Frieze Sculpture Park, London (2016), Sculpture in the City, London (2016), Sotheby’s Beyond Limits Exhibitions, London (2008), New Art Centre, Salisbury (2008), Jerwood Foundation, Alcester (2007). Selected collections include: Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Harvard Museum, Cambridge; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Contemporary Art Museum, Osaka; International Museum of Ceramics, Faenza; San Diego Museum of Art.

Fernando Casasempere was born in Santiago de Chile in 1958 and trained at Scola Forma and Escuela de Arte y Oficios, Barcelona. He moved to London in 1997, where he currently lives and works.

About Fred Levine
Fred Levine is a contemporary art gallery based in Bruton, Somerset in the UK. The gallery was founded in 2019 under its former name Informality in Oxfordshire and had occupied a permanent premise until 2022, further extending its programme in London at Cromwell Place until 2024. Fred Levine hosts a diverse exhibition programme both nationally and internationally and has exhibited works by some of the most celebrated contemporary artists including, Kapwani Kiwanga, Martine Poppe, Hannah Brown, Fernando Casasempere and Francesca Mollett.

Contact
info@fredlevine.co.uk

Fred Levine
The Old Silk Barn, Quaperlake Street
Bruton, BA10 0HB
United Kingdom

Photos courtesy of Fred Levine. © Fernando Casasempere. Photography by Tom Mannion

Martin Woll Godal: Sequence is on view at Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal

October 11 – December 30, 2025

In each gallery room, large ceramic installations by Martin Woll Godal are presented, breaking with and challenging the material’s unique qualities, history, possibilities, and limitations.

Sequence is carefully composed by the artist, with each room inviting an unavoidable physical encounter. What is a space—mentally and physically? How do we navigate and interpret a room or a landscape where given perspectives shift? What happens to us when we stand beneath a porcelain sky or pass by a corridor of ceilings we would normally walk under?

Throughout his practice, Martin Woll Godal has consistently explored the materiality of clay and ceramics. He works empathetically with craft, art, and architecture as a whole—across both large and small formats.

The spatial memory of clay

Essay by Peder Valle, art historian

Scientists who study human memory explain it by saying that our sensory impressions are stored, retrieved and recognised, before being stored again – usually in a slightly modified version. A memory changes a little each time it is recalled. When we struggle to think of something, it is due to a lack of correspondence with stored memories. In the same way, the eureka moment we experience when the answer reveals itself is a sign that we actually recognise something we feel we have forgotten; we have basically “remembered” it all along.

Martin Woll Godal’s ceramics evoke the same recognition. Not only because they are reminiscent of shapes and constructions we have seen before, and which are part of our personal or collective memory. On the contrary, it is as if the clay itself remembers, evoking, imitating, and recalling images, figures, and installations that we recognise.

Ceiling

This is the case with the first artwork we encounter, Ceiling. One hundred and fifty hand-beaten porcelain tiles are mounted hanging from the ceiling, on steel wire, with porcelain fixing plugs. The soft, slightly wavy shape testifies to the work of the hand and the inherent imprecision of craftsmanship. The installation, as a whole, however, evokes associations with the ubiquitous ceiling tiles found in public spaces and offices; featureless architectural elements that anonymously form the framework for our routine daily lives. And at the same time, the shiny, glazed surface makes us recognise the Ceiling as porcelain; something handmade, shiny and alive within the framework of the predictable.

Front

Martin Woll Godal’s ceramics assume architectural proportions. Not only in handmade ceilings, but also in height, as with the column of turned terracotta rings that he made for the Norwegian Association of Craft Artists’ Annual Exhibition in 2015. Now the rings are back, and more daring than before: In the work Front, they balance on edge, forming a high wall between the room’s two columns. At the same time, the open centre of the rings forms an airy and finely meshed construction: Almost like lace, the spaces become defining, emphasising the unbearable lightness of the ceramic wall. Closed, but still open.

Passage

Architecture is, like ceramics, a non-renewable resource. Architecture in the sense that what is demolished can never come back, just as ceramics can never return to its original state as clay. Many ceramics have also ended up on the scrap heap of history as discarded building material; old bricks and roof tiles with no future prospects, and no prospect of being reused.

Martin has done something about this. In the work Passasje, the old, single-curved roof tiles from his own workshop play a leading role, having previously served on the roof of an old house in Arendal, before being reused on the main house where Martin lives, and finally on the workshop building. To this cycle, the artist has added another chapter: Next to the stack of old roof tiles is a stack of roof tiles that are cast after one of them, one with damage, and made with reused stoneware clay. In this way, the ceramics imitate their own history, form, use, and material, creating a passage from what has been to what is.

Cavity/Beaker

The cavity defines the plasticity, load-bearing capacity and form of ceramics. That is why the turned clay vessel contains an immortal ceramic truth, about structure and volume, about technique and materiality. In the work of the same name, the cavities are black-glazed, cocoon-shaped and assembled. As a visual reminder of the clay’s earthly origins, the vessels appear self-grown, organic, almost plant-like.

The ultimate hollow space, however, is the drinking vessel. The cup, the goblet – the ceramicist’s basic form and inevitable cliché, which is characterised by its boundlessly mundane task: to hold liquid. Martin Woll Godal devotes an entire room to this ceramic archetype, where three different sizes run all the way around the room – like the notes of a piece of music with a fixed rhythm and a recurring theme.

Structure III/Metropolis

The rhythm also characterises the work Structure III, where row after row of squares are formed from extruded square tubes. Here, the ceramics are industrial, regular, and metallic, while the handmade is limited to the memory of the malleability that lies in the clay’s essence. In more than 70 repetitions, the clay continues to insist on the sovereignty of ceramics as a material: Malleable, but still hard; light, but still firm. In the last room, the elements are united in a sculptural tribute to sculptor Arne Vinje Gunnerud’s Metropolis on Nygårdshøyden in Bergen, a miniature cityscape featuring slender skyscrapers that reach towards the sky.

Clay remembers where we have been before and where we come from. In Martin Woll Godal’s Forløp, we are confronted with new and old truths, and build a new understanding of the potential of ceramics. For in the space between construction and reproduction lies the potential – but also the memory.

About Martin Woll Godal
Martin Woll Godal (b. 1982, Bærum; raised in Trysil) lives and works in Arendal. He was educated at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design and has held several solo exhibitions as well as participated in national and international group shows. These include Uppsala Art Museum, CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, Archangelsk Artist Union Gallery in Russia, and the Peder Balke Center. Woll Godal’s work is represented in the collections of the National Museum, Kunstsilo, Uppsala Art Museum, and KODE.

Contact
post@bomuldsfabriken.no

Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall
Oddenveien 5
4847 Arendal
Norway

Photo credit: Tor Simen Ulstein, Kunstdok/Bomuldsfabriken

Jim Melchert: Where the Boundaries Are is on view at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, San Francisco

October 18, 2025 – January 3, 2026

di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the first major retrospective by the seminal Bay Area artist Jim Melchert. Melchert is often described as the “great philosopher of the post-war craft movement,” and the exhibition will celebrate and explore the legacy of one of America’s great artists, who challenged ceramic tradition of expression, form, and function and helped elevate the medium’s acceptance into mainstream contemporary sculpture. Curated by Griff Williams, founder of Gallery 16 and a close friend of Melchert’s, the exhibition will delve into his storied career, bringing together more than 60 works that span six decades for the first time, including several works that haven’t been publicly exhibited before.

Melchert was a central figure in a community of California artists in the 1960s who elevated the field of ceramics to a contemporary artform. He became a landmark figure in American art along with friends Pete Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Ruth Asawa, Bruce Conner, Roy De Forest, and Bruce Nauman. Through the works on view, the exhibition will explore Melchert’s work with Voulkos, Ken Price, Viola Frey and Nagle in the 1960s, and will document the artist’s involvement in the California Funk movement, his groundbreaking 1970s performances, his conceptual art, and showcases the thrilling broken tile works that preoccupied the artist at the end of his career.

“Melchert’s artwork was the embodiment of his kind and inquisitive spirit,” said curator Griff Williams. “We see in his late tile work a metaphor for life. What lies behind these broken shards in Melchert’s mesmerizing works is something remarkable: Optimism. Nothing is beyond repair. These works are born from the belief that we have the power to bring positive change from our misfortune. By embracing the imperfect, he was celebrating our resilience, diversity, and human strength.”

Melchert had a long and deeply influential career, and di Rosa is a natural fit to celebrate his work and legacy. Founder Rene di Rosa was an early collector and longtime friend of Melchert. Among the works in the exhibition will be a large-scale photograph of Melchert’s seminal 1965 work “Earth Door,” a land-art work commissioned by di Rosa. To create the work, which is still on view at di Rosa’s Napa property, Melchert dug a mold into the land that echoed the pattern of plowed vineyards. He then poured concrete and eventually stood the casting upright, a monument to the land and the place.

“di Rosa was central to Melchert’s life and career,” said Kate Eilertsen, Executive Director and Chief Curator at di Rosa. “Over decades spent there in fellowship with other artists, it became a place that nurtured and expanded his multi-faceted, genre-bending practice. We are proud to present this overdue retrospective of a towering figure in the history of Northern California art.”

Melchert was noted for his openness to experimentation and his encouragement of that in others. While championing the new with particular emphasis on conceptualism and clay, he also set standards of integrity and grace among artists. A philosophical concept underscores Melchert’s artwork, proposing that when something is broken, it can be repaired and made stronger and more beautiful. We see in Melchert’s tile work a metaphor for life. What lies behind these broken shards in Melchert’s mesmerizing works is something remarkable: optimism. Nothing is beyond repair. These works are born from the belief that we have the power to bring positive change from our misfortune and contribute to the depth of our shared story.

The first-ever monograph on Melchert, Jim Melchert: Where The Boundaries Are (find the book on Amazon / Bookshop.org), written by Griff Williams, will accompany the exhibition. The book is 256 pages of color illustrations with essays by artists and curatorial luminaries capture the artist’s work in every stage of his illustrious career illuminating his performance art and his celebrated ceramic works. The monograph includes essays by Tanya Zimbardo, Sequoia Miller, Renny Pritikin, and Maria Porges.

About Jim Melchert
Jim Melchert (1930-2023) was born in New Bremen, OH and died in Oakland, CA. He received degrees from Princeton and the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied ceramic with Voulkos. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and then at UC Berkeley. He was director of the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977 until 1981 and in doing so, he created the Peer Review system used in nearly every field today. He is widely regarded as one of the most fierce defenders of artistic freedoms. He was also Director of the American Academy in Rome from 1984 until 1988.

His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world and s included in such prestigious collections and Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; World Ceramic Center; Icheon, Korea; Museum of Art & Design, New York; Renwick Gallery; Smithsonian Institution; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the di Rosa, Napa; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

About di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art
di Rosa is a non-profit art center and nature preserve specializing in the art of Northern California. Located at 5200 Sonoma Highway, di Rosa includes a permanent collection comprised of more than 1600 works housed in a large art gallery and outdoor Sculpture Meadow. Visitors can enjoy the integration of art and nature, as di Rosa is also home to a beautiful lake, walking trails with vineyard views, and picnic grounds. di Rosa presents contemporary exhibitions by Bay Area-based artists and maintains a permanent collection of notable works by artists with ties to the Bay Area from the mid-twentieth century to the early 2000s. di Rosa offers an array of public programs and events for all ages to inspire creativity and curiosity.

Contact
visit@dirosaart.org

di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art
1150 25th Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
United States

Installation views courtesy di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art

Samuel Sarmiento: Relical Horn is on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

November 7 – December 20, 2025

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present Samuel Sarmiento: Relical Horn, the Venezuelan artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Born in 1987 and based in Aruba, Sarmiento investigates—through the intertwining of ceramic sculpture and drawing—the fictional possibilities of history, the force of oral traditions, and the pliancy of time: a time that denies a single beginning and falters before envisioning its own end. In Relical Horn, Sarmiento unveils a striking ensemble of kiln-fired ceramic sculptures brimming with overlapping narratives, characters, inscriptions, and both chromatic and volumetric experimentation.

The ancestral technique of ceramics—where human hands extract matter directly from the earth as though tearing away fragments of geological flesh, imprinting form with their fingers and palms, transferring a cerebral vision into mineral entity—anchors Sarmiento’s practice. The clay is then colored, adorned, and fired at temperatures at which any organic matter would be scorched into extinction. He experiments with various patinas, glazes, pigments, and even gold, which, under the kiln’s searing heat, yield kaleidoscopic, granular, and aqueous surfaces. Like the unreliable mechanisms of memory, certain areas of his ceramics are erased, intensified, or transfigured through firing—altered by the unforeseen oxidation that stains and textures their surfaces.

In his works, Sarmiento understands history—whether the so-called official narrative or the myths and legends perpetuated through unwritten means—as a structure built from narrative forces: the multiplicity of interpretive viewpoints, the superimposition of temporal understandings, the blurred edge where fact dissolves into fiction, the myth of historical impartiality, and the paradox of history itself—as both total and infinitesimal, encompassing the world yet anchored in a single, fragile subject.

Sarmiento unsettles our perception of history by fabricating new ruins—archaeological remnants of the present, ultracontemporary fossils that provocatively friction against a scattershot constellation of references. Ancestral and mythological traditions from Central America collide and entwine with canonical images from art history—such as Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) and Joan Mitchell’s Bonjour Julie (1971)—alongside crucial philosophical texts, from Socratic maieutics to Walter Benjamin’s hermeneutics, and with key films from German cinema, such as Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), an epic tale in which a romantic dreamer, enthralled by the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, attempts to build a magnificent opera house in the Brazilian Amazon. Sarmiento also brings into the institutional art sphere the content and sensibility of other forms of transmission—oral tradition, music, poetry, hallucinatory imagery, and fabulation born of psychoactive vision, as in many native Latin American communities. These channels become catalysts for new myths, legends, and fantastic histories.

His works provoke reflection on whether, centuries from now, the events and gestures of our present—so ordinary to us today—will be seen with the same aura of peculiarity and distinction that we project onto the remnants of past civilizations. To work directly with clay and fire is to engage with expanded notions of mineral time and ancestral technique—temporal intervals so vast as to elude comprehension when measured against a human life span that, at best, reaches a mere century.

The Venezuelan artist is also deeply interested in how a classic, a tradition, or a canon comes into being—particularly within Eurocentric systems of thought. He questions what attributes elevate an object or event from the inertia of ordinary existence into singularity, rendering it exceptional. Hence his fascination with what he terms the “relical horn”: a distinctive element that accrues symbolic and historical density, transforming an object into a relic—layering it with temporal sediment that fractures linear history and establishes new coordinates, new points at which history itself is inscribed.

Is such singularity guaranteed by adherence to an aesthetic or narrative program? Might there exist a formula capable of eliciting a specific emotion, much as the German art historian Aby Warburg explored through his Pathosformeln? Could there be a model, a framework, a structure? Questioning what a classic is, South African writer J. M. Coetzee writes: “So we arrive at a certain paradox. The classic defines itself by surviving. Therefore the interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the history of the classic, inevitable and even to be welcomed. For as long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself classic.”

To possess a horn—this desired, fetishized object—one must first slay a creature of immense grandeur: a rhinoceros, an elephant, or even a unicorn. It is, therefore, a fragment of present yearning bound to an absent body. A boundary is thus drawn: for a time, that body or object served a practical function, and from its absence emerged layers of symbolic existence. In much the same way, when an artist dies or disappears, a trace remains—a proof that they once walked the earth: their work. So it is with relics in the history of Christianity: fragments of bodies, garments, or objects once touched by saints, toward which the faithful direct their prayers and pilgrimages. The fetishism surrounding relics extends equally to civilizations—archaeological remains, cave paintings, ceramic vessels. Our societies yearn for material fragments of the past in order to sustain an increasingly immaterial future.

Sarmiento’s works urge us to question whether today’s digital data—ostensibly eternal, safely stored in invisible clouds—are truly as enduring as the tangible and timeworn matter of stone, clay, or ceramic, which have preserved human marks for millennia. Perhaps these so-called primitive materials are, in their resilience, more advanced than the latest digital devices when it comes to the preservation of knowledge. Thus, the artist writes by hand—graphite on clay—long cursive texts as though to safeguard them: art criticism essays, Latin American short stories, museum exhibition checklists. In a satirical gesture, he imagines how, centuries from now, those same texts might be unearthed by people who neither speak our language nor share our alphabet, leading to the most fanciful conjectures about the mundane lists of an artist whose only modest intent was to confront history—just as we now do with ancient artifacts such as the Phaistos Disc, the Roman dodecahedron, or the Incan quipus.

Sarmiento also underscores the importance of communication vehicles that, within the art world, document the achievements that gradually accumulate into historical record. A copy of Artforum is provocatively paired, in the title of one of his works, with the Rosetta Stone—that carved slab crucial to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. These journals of a “real fiction,” while they validate the art production of a specific context, also expose the collapse of a narrow, self-referential history read by few. Sarmiento points to the small fiefdom we, art workers, inhabit—voluntarily confined, declaring a mere half-acre to be the world, blind to the vast constellation of other stories that have shaped humanity. Of course, this small piece of molded, painted earth still tells us much: beauty, civilization, and the traces of history remain bound to disciplines that are, paradoxically, both revelatory and restricted—accessible to only a few. Touching the paradoxical nerve where the microcosm expands into the macrocosm and vice versa, Sarmiento amplifies the power of oral histories that have long underpinned Caribbean cultures while reflecting the reflux of Western visual art itself.

Sarmiento, like each of us, is both a reader and a writer of history. He is an inventor of truths and a spectator of lies, a victim of memory’s accidents and of forgetfulness. He is the tiger trapped in time—the only animal to bear the stripes of its own cage upon its skin. In Relical Horn, Sarmiento seems to construct his own museum of living relics—objects that never cease to deliberate on truth, to chatter about the narratives of the past. They question themselves restlessly about their origins, their cycles of repetition. A fictive, eternal museum.

Text by Mateus Nunes, PhD

Contact
info@edlingallery.com

Andrew Edlin Gallery
392 Broadway, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10013
United States

Photos courtesy of the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery

Captions

• Samuel Sarmiento, Ganda, the Rhino Traveler (NY Version), 2025, Glaze and luster gold on stoneware, 14.5 x 12 x 5 inches / 37 x 31 x 13 cm
• Samuel Sarmiento, Tigers in Love, 2025, Glaze and luster gold on stoneware, 19.5 x 22 x 2 inches / 50 x 56 x 5 cm
• Samuel Sarmiento, Miles Davis – Aranjuez Concert, Spain. 1960., 2025, Glaze and luster gold on stoneware, 13.5 x 15 x 3.75 inches / 34 x 38 x 10 cm
• Samuel Sarmiento, The Hunt of the Unicorn, 1495–1505, 2025, Pigment, glaze and luster gold on stoneware, 12 x 12 x 2.5 inches / 31 x 31 x 6 cm
• Samuel Sarmiento, Richard Serra – Tilted Arc 1981 (New Myths New Legends), 2024, Pigment, glaze and luster gold on stoneware, 6.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches / 16 x 16 x 4 cm
• Samuel Sarmiento, Fitzcarraldo 1982 (New Myths New Legends), 2024, Pigment, glaze and luster gold on stoneware, 11.5 x 11.5 x 3.25 inches / 29 x 29 x 8 cm
• Samuel Sarmiento, The Origin of the Stars, 2025, Glaze on stoneware, 28 x 24 x 13 inches / 71 x 61 x 33 cm

Irene Nordli: Both Sides Now is on view at HB381 Gallery, New York

November 7 – December 20, 2025

HB381 is pleased to announce Both Sides Now, a solo exhibition of new sculptural works by ceramicist Irene Nordli (b. 1967, Norway). Nordli forms clay into convulsive vessels, complex assemblages freighted with wrinkling folds and amorphous ribbons of matter that sag, stretch, and compress under the active force of her hands. Exquisitely produced, her intricate sculptures turn the body of the vessel inside out, inviting viewers to contemplate both sides simultaneously: the interior and exterior, the refined and discordant, recto and verso, the structure and the open network of space within it.

While seemingly abstract, Nordli’s work represents a dance with the figurative, extending sculpture’s tradition into somatic terrain. “I consider them almost like bodies,” she says of her vessels, describing the gestural and twisting movement generated by each piece. Although at a remove from classical statuary, they revive its tenets of pose and stance, mimicking the way a body might stretch, bend, or strain. Nordli, however, is less interested in classical ideals of harmony and balance, preferring to render her vessels ragged, unstable, even abject. Often, they are riddled with holes and slender openings, sometimes almost approaching aspects of a skeletal structure or the cavities of tissue and organs. These apertures into the vessels’ interiors rid the works of any pretense of function; as alluded to in her titles, they serve as vessels for secrets, introspection, protection, sorrow, and enigma. One finds this in Nordli’s Vessels for the Unknown with their fragmented and disquieting forms, which hold space for intangible sensations and philosophical musings.

The exterior surfaces of many of the artist’s ceramics are produced through a succession of impressions. Forms are cast from an archive of plaster mother molds that Nordli collected over the years. These range in subject matter from traditional and personal to popular and kitsch: mass-produced figurines, precious or impudent animal figures, neoclassical columns and Greco-Roman statuary, and anatomical casts taken from life, to name a few. To begin each vessel, Nordli presses portions of the clay into those molds, the surfaces of which transfer the delicate textures and fissures of the original object. The impressions are then arranged side by side and sutured to one another through the extraordinary malleability of clay, buttressed with coiled ropes of clay. She continues in this way until the desired height and complexity is achieved. Her process then begins in earnest, abstracting and reworking her subjects until they become something unfamiliar, torqued, infinitely folded. Once glazed, the final form is replete with internal interrelations, unforeseen combinations, and chimerical embellishments. “My sculptures are made of parts, fragmented. Fragility is something I want to stress,” she says.

Yet these individual details ultimately give themselves up to the roiled, tempestuous surface of the vessel, each distinct form all but disappearing into the totality of the surface. In opposition to the refined and spare harmony associated with so much of the Scandinavian tradition of studio ceramics, Nordli’s vessels pursue a charged and chaotic imperfection. In many ways, they echo the frenzied quality and pace of contemporary life, offering a disquieting vision of simultaneity: skulls and vertebrae in concert with kitsch tchotchkes and patriotic iconography.

For Both Sides Now, Nordli has returned to some of her earliest pressing molds collected in the 1990s while attending a studio art program at Ohio State University. One such mold in the form of a screeching eagle, wings wide and talons extended, offers a prescient image of political bombast.

Indeed, ongoing political tensions and tragedy inform much of the work. “I’m building new vessels in a world that is changing so quickly and becoming more unstable and unpredictable by the day,” Nordli says. “Wars are raging and soon there will be nothing left of Gaza. We all feel desperate. I continue to create; I want to and have to. I flip between losing myself in my work and trying to inject something of the world into what I create. In these sculptures you’ll find fragments of pillars, eagles, and bones, but first and foremost, I strive for movement, textures, colors, and lines that bring the vessels to life.”

The result encompasses a particularly hallucinatory form of perception, not unlike the endless barrage of media cohering and dispersing. Nordli’s formal iconography folds and unfolds, stretching elastically as though under the pressure of centrifugal and centripetal forces. Offsetting the cacophonous agitation of her vessels, Both Sides Now also features a series of monumental porcelain tiles produced in Jingdezhen, China, and later glazed in Norway. Treated with painterly oxides and glazes, they provide a moment of respite, open-ended and vibrantly decorated. Like portals or thresholds, they distill the movement of the three-dimensional works in whirling vortices and fluid bursts of gesture set against the empty blankness of a flat plane of porcelain.

Alongside the exhibition, Hostler Burrows is thrilled to host the launch of Nordli’s monographic publication My Hands Just Keep Getting Bigger (arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart; Hostler Burrows, New York), written and edited by Gjertrud Steinsvåg, with a conversation between Nordli, Steinsvåg, and designer Martin Lundell during the run of the show.

Nordli holds a degree from the National College of Art and Design in Bergen and has also been a professor at KHIO in Oslo, Norway. Her work has been exhibited internationally with solo and group presentations at venues such as Officine Saffi (Italy), Clay Museum of Ceramic Art (Denmark), Bernardaud Foundation (France), Gustavsbergs Konsthall (Sweden), Suzhou Jinji Lake Art Museum (China), and the Grand Palais (France). She has also been exhibited widely throughout Norway at locations such as the Royal Castle in Oslo, Kunsthall Grenland, The National Museum in Oslo, KODE in Bergen, and Format Oslo. Nordli has also completed a number of large scale commissions at various locations in Norway.

Both Sides Now is presented with the support of the Norwegian Consulate, New York.

Contact
info@hb381gallery.com

HB381
381 Broadway
New York, NY 10013
United States

Photos by Joe Kramm

Captions

• Irene Nordli, Early Face, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 16.5″ H x 10″ W x 7.75″ D
• Irene Nordli, Green Complex 3, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 24.75″ H x 11.5″ W x 12.5″ D
• Irene Nordli, Porcelain Fever, 2025, Glazed porcelain, 29.25″ H x 17″ W x 16.5″ D
• Irene Nordli, Sorrow of the Night, 2022, Glazed porcelain, 17.75″ H x 19.25″ W x 14.5″ D
• Irene Nordli, Vessel for Air, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 17.5″ H x 11.75″ W x 9.75″ D
• Irene Nordli, Vessel for Growth, 2025, Glazed stoneware and porcelain, 23.75″ H x 10″ W x 11.5″ D
• Irene Nordli, The Collapse of the Columns, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 51.25″ H x 22″ W x 20.5″ D
• Irene Nordli, Vessel 24, 2021, Glazed stoneware, 43.25″ H x 23.75″ Dia.
• Irene Nordli, Vessel for Protection, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 38.25″ H x 19″ W x 21″ D

Alison Wing Yin Poon: A Constructed Home is on view at Tache Gallery, London

November 12 – December 16, 2025

Tache presents A Constructed Home, the debut solo exhibition of London-based artist Alison Wing Yin Poon. The exhibition explores the nuances of mixed-heritage identity, material memory, and belonging, while engaging with contemporary debates surrounding cultural heritage and authenticity. Through sculptural installations, ceramics, and etchings, Poon examines our connection to the spaces we inhabit, combining found objects with ceramic, lacquer, and faux bois to evoke a sense of cross-cultural familiarity.

Poon, of Malaysian Chinese and English heritage and raised in the United Kingdom, grounds her practice in tactile experimentation, playful storytelling, and curatorial thinking. Drawing on personal experiences and archives, domestic spaces, craft traditions, and cultural interactions, she creates installations that weave together lived experience and fiction. Her work explores how memories can romanticise the past, how cultures navigate and represent their histories and notions of “The Other,” and how these narratives evolve under the pressures of modernisation, capitalism, and questions of authenticity.

The artist examines Chinese culture through a distinctly Malaysian lens, animating her sculptural pieces with hybrid animal figures drawn from the iconography of Penang’s temples, alongside motifs inspired by everyday objects such as roof tiles, lightbulbs and dressing room mirrors. Her large-scale sculptures draw structural support from found furnishings in rattan and bamboo: materials traded between Malaysia and the UK during the colonial era, which remain commonplace in households around the world.

Exhibition highlights include: The Headless Guardian, a totemic assemblage sculpture that reflects on the enduring presence of sacred architecture and the illusory nature of change; Pot Luck, a sculpture inspired by a traditional Chinese Cheongsam dress, that reimagines the garment as an artefact to explore how clothing shapes identity; a limited edition aquatint produced exclusively for this exhibition; and works created during the artist’s Decorative Surface Fellowship at the City & Guilds of London Art School, debuting for the first time. These pieces incorporate techniques such as faux bois, gilding, and japanning – historically cross-cultural crafts that Poon reinterprets for a contemporary context.

Outgrown, a sculptural work, is inspired by the artist’s frequent visits to a renowned Buddhist temple in Malaysia. It reflects on the site’s transformation over two decades, from a modest, somewhat neglected place of worship with few visitors into a bustling tourist destination. Drawing on her own experiences, such as returning to feed the temple’s turtles only to find their pond fenced off by a pay machine and overshadowed by a kitschy statue, Poon meditates on the vulnerability of space, memory, and ritual in the face of commercialisation and change. A Coiled Connection weaves together tableaux of the artist’s ancestral village in rural China with precise reproductions of the serpentine ornamentation found in Malaysian temples. From geckos on bedroom walls to monitor lizards sheltering in drainpipes and snakes taking refuge in abandoned homes, reptiles come to represent the resilience of everyday life, quietly persisting and adapting even as globalisation reshapes the world.

Additional highlights include a new, site-specific installation that responds to the shifting natural light and townhouse architecture of Tache’s gallery, while reflecting on the domestic spaces of Poon’s grandfather’s home in Penang.

About Alison Wing Yin Poon
Alison Wing Yin Poon (b.1996) lives and works in London. She was the 2024-2025 Decorative Surfaces Fellow at City & Guilds of London Art School, supported by the Company of Painter Stainers. She received the Leverhulme Scholarship to undertake an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School, completing in 2024. Alison also holds an MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics from Goldsmiths College, and a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art for which she received the 2018 Rossi Asiaghi Art Ward. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Seem Both Distant and So Close’ Warbling Collective (London, 2025); ‘Apocalyptic Changes of State’ with Brushes with Greatness (London, 2024), and ‘See|Me Roots’ at Gallery Arte Azuejo (New York, 2022).

Contact
info@tachegallery.com

Tache Gallery
33 Percy Street
London W1T 2DF
United Kingdom

Photos by Sergey Novikov. Courtesy of Tache Gallery

Tender Buttons is on view at Musée Ariana, Geneva

September 15, 2025 – October 4, 2026

From 19 September 2025 to 4 October 2026, Musée Ariana presents Tender Buttons in its freely accessible gallery. Echoing Gertrude Stein’s eponymous poetry collection, this exhibition is entirely dedicated to the button, exploring its many facets through design, fashion, art, literature, politics and social history.

Curated by Claire FitzGerald, Chief Curator of the museum, the exhibition brings together more than 300 ceramic and glass buttons, placed in dialogue with works from Musée Ariana spanning the 18th century to the present day. The project takes as its starting point the button production of ceramicist Lucie Rie, which has recently enriched a new field of study within the museum’s collections, thanks to a donation from collector Frank Nievergelt.

Buttons emerge here as vehicles of formal experimentation, but also as instruments of survival, identity and collaboration. The often-overlooked social histories of these everyday objects are highlighted through a scenography by Lucie de Martin, inspired by the architecture of 19th-century shopping arcades – a key period for the industrialisation of porcelain and glass buttons.

Developed in collaboration with the Swiss Fashion Museum (MuMode) in Yverdon-les-Bains, the exhibition also includes unique loans from prestigious institutions: the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), Musée Carnavalet–Histoire de Paris, the Musée de la Vie romantique and private collections.

Through this journey, Tender Buttons pays tribute to an object that is both utilitarian and deeply symbolic, a mirror of fashion trends, techniques and identities.

Programme (selection):
• Thematic tours
• Origin of Materials and Craftsmanship: The Button as a Social Marker with Nathalie Ducatel, curator-restorer, Sunday, 8 February 2026 at 11am

Contact
ariana@ville-ge.ch

Musée Ariana – Swiss Museum for Ceramics and Glass
Avenue de la Paix 10
1202 Geneva
Switzerland

Photos by Boris Dunand, courtesy of Musée Ariana.

Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art is on view at Ford Foundation Gallery, New York

September 10 – December 6, 2025

Body Vessel Clay brings together three generations of groundbreaking Black women artists whose work with clay explores the medium’s multilayered cultural and political significance. Featuring over fifty works across ceramics, film, photography, and archives, the exhibition draws connections between the legacy of renowned Nigerian potter Ladi Dosei Kwali (1925-1984) and contemporary artistic practice. Through these lines of influence and innovation, the show traces how Black women artists have transformed the field of ceramics over the past seventy years—disrupting conventions, challenging hierarchies, and expanding the possibilities of clay as a medium.

Following critical acclaim at Two Temple Place in London and York Art Gallery in 2022, this landmark exhibition makes its U.S. debut on the centenary of Kwali’s birth, honoring her powerful work’s deep and broad influence over time and place. Curated by Dr. Jareh Das, this iteration of the exhibition features new works and includes three U.S.-based artists: Adebunmi Gbadebo, Simone Leigh, and Anina Major. It challenges dominant narratives in ceramics history by celebrating matrilineal, Indigenous African pottery techniques and clay’s enduring presence as both an artistic and functional form of expression. Dr. Das’s revelatory curation will immerse visitors in a contemplative space for reflecting on the layered histories of ceramics and the radical potentials of form, gesture, and the material memory of clay. The transformative qualities of the featured works become amplified in conversation with each other across generations, redefining and pushing the boundaries of ceramics.

The exhibition begins with Ladi Kwali, whose pioneering work revolutionized ceramics in West Africa and beyond. In 1954, Kwali joined the Pottery Training Centre (since renamed the Ladi Kwali Pottery Centre) in Suleja (formerly Abuja), established by British potter Michael Cardew (1901-1983), as the first female trainee. There, she was introduced to modern techniques of glazing and high-temperature kiln firing, transforming once-functional objects into collectable decorative works. Kwali is most celebrated for her hand-built Gbari water pots. She also created various thrown objects, including tankards, plates, dishes, bowls, and more, a range on display in the selection of her works featured in the show.

This meeting of British studio pottery and Indigenous Nigerian hand-built pottery traditions marked a pivotal moment in Nigerian modernism and craft history. Through a presentation of ceramics, archival photographs, press clippings, letters, and publications, this exhibition offers a rare insight into life at the Pottery Training Centre, its legacy, and the international acclaim Kwali achieved during her lifetime, including her appearance on Nigeria’s 20-Naira note.

Kwali paved the way for other women from her community to join the Pottery Training Centre, including Gbari potters Halima Audu and Asibi Ido, both of whom developed distinct artistic voices. Like their mentor, they continued to produce hybrid ceramic forms that combined traditional hand-building techniques with modern methods, as seen in their displayed works. An early vessel by ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo featured in the exhibition reflects the lasting impact of her formative 1974 visit to Nigeria and her direct encounter with Kwali. At the recommendation of Michael Cardew, Odundo interned at the Pottery Training Centre, where she worked alongside Kwali and other potters, learning Gbari hand-building and burnishing techniques and key practical skills. These methods became foundational to her evolving practice. Over the past four decades, Odundo has developed a singular approach that weaves African and ancient Greek and Roman ceramic traditions into refined, anthropomorphic vessel forms—works honoring matrilineal knowledge while forging new sculptural languages.

Kwali’s presence is also felt obliquely as her influence resonates through a younger generation of international contemporary Black women artists who work with clay in radical, experimental, and deeply personal ways. Bisila Noha’s thrown and hand-built two-legged vessels stem from her project, Searching for Kouame Kakahá: A celebration of the unnamed women of clay; our shared mothers and grandmothers (2020-), which redresses the fact that pottery, especially that made by women in the Global South, has been ignored, belittled, and forgotten. Adebunmi Gbadebo uses culturally and historically imbued materials, including clay, hair, and rice, to craft vessels from soil sourced at Fort Motte, South Carolina, where her ancestors were enslaved. These works embody mourning, memory, and reclamation to honor erased histories through meditative African coil techniques. Each vessel becomes a site of spiritual excavation, connecting land, lineage, and the enduring impact of slavery across generations. Phoebe Collings-James’s ongoing Infidel series (2023-) draws on West African and Caribbean ceramic traditions of coiled vessel-making, reimagining the “infidel” as a container for national, political, and spiritual knowledge. Described by the artist as a “heretic anthology,” these ceramic sculptures, presented in procession, are ambiguous, creature-like, and vessel forms with mouths that seem to speak or shout. At once unsettling and fragile, they evoke vulnerability, resistance, and transformation, reclaiming the figure of the “infidel” as a potent symbol of defiance.

Clay is both a material and a metaphor in performance, as its malleability evokes transformation, memory, and resistance. In performance, it becomes more than a medium; it becomes a collaborator, a force to shape and be shaped by. In Clay (2015), filmed by Webb-Ellis, Jade de Montserrat uses her body to engage directly with the land in repetitive digging, building, and submerging. Her gestures, rooted in childhood memories of rural Yorkshire, speak to the human body’s elemental connection to the earth, symbolising both creation and extraction. Julia Phillips’s Becoming (the Hunter, the Twerker, the Submitter) (2015), a silent video loop, isolates and fragments a dancing figure into disjointed body parts. This deconstruction evokes themes of desire, predation, and submission. Through ambiguous choreography, Phillips probes bodily autonomy, objectification, and power. In her six-hour durational performance, Uro (2018), Chinasa Vivian Ezugha physically labored with 30kg of raw clay, applying it to her body and canvas in a visceral exchange of resistance and collaboration. For Body Vessel Clay, Ezugha revisits this performance through photographs and a new sculptural work that remembers clay not as static, but as a dynamic presence, material witness, weight, and memory all at once.

Works in the show embody innovative material strategies for preserving cultural knowledge and histories. Anina Major’s woven and glazed ceramic sculptures, like the one presented, reinterpret the Bahamian tradition of plaiting, a straw-based weaving technique, drawing on early memories and a desire to preserve her cultural heritage. Adapting this technique to clay by altering clay body recipes, Major achieved the elasticity needed to mimic the interlacing forms of plaited palm, transforming an ephemeral tradition into enduring ceramic form. For Major, firing the work is both an act of remembrance and resistance to preserve the fragility of straw through the permanence of clay. Simone Leigh’s sculpture on view from her Village Series (2023-2024) blurs the boundaries between body and structure, referencing African architecture, ritual vessels, and ancestral presences. Her glazed ceramic and bronze sculptures often draw inspiration from vernacular architectural forms and aesthetics in African art traditions. Leigh’s work asserts ceramic form as both symbolic architecture and embodiment, materializing histories often excluded from dominant narratives. The artist describes her practice as autoethnographic, rooted in Black feminist thought and explorations of Black female-identified subjectivity.

The artists in Body Vessel Clay share a deep fascination with testing the medium’s properties to create new, personal, political, collective, and visionary aesthetics across geographies and temporalities. By tracing lines of continuity between past and present, Body Vessel Clay repositions clay not as peripheral but as central to global art histories and as a vessel for memory, defiance, and transformation.

The exhibition features work by artists including Halima Audu, Phoebe Collings-James, Jade de Montserrat, Chinasa Vivian Ezugha, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Ladi Kwali, Simone Leigh, Anina Major, Bisila Noha, Magdalene Odundo, and Julia Phillips. It also includes a rich selection of Abuja Pottery ceramics (Michael Cardew, Asibi Ido, and George Sempagala), and archival material—correspondence, press clippings, and photographic
documentation—related to the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja, drawn from the collections of Doig Simmonds, the Crafts Study Centre, and the W.A. Ismay Archive at York Museums Trust. Exquisite, research-led exhibition design by Ayo Design and graphic design by NMutiti Studio invite readers into a dynamic, contemplative journey across the show’s layered themes and interconnections.

Body Vessel Clay is realized with loans from Brooklyn Museum; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Crafts Council Collection (U.K.); the Crafts Study Centre and University for the Creative Arts at Farnham (U.K.); The Newark Museum of Art; York Museums Trust (U.K.); and private lenders.

Contact
gallery@fordfoundation.org

Ford Foundation Gallery
320 E 43rd St
New York, NY 10017
United States

Photos by Sebastian Bach. Courtesy Ford Foundation Gallery

Captions

• fig 1. Installation view, Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art
• fig 2. Ladi Kwali (Nigeria, 1925-1984) Water pot, 1959, Earthenware, large hand-built pot with rim incised and inlaid red pattern with a transparent glaze 13 ¼ x 14 ⅛ inches / Water pot, 1959, Earthenware, hand-built, impressed and incised geometric decoration, glaze over red slip, wood-fired 11 ¾ x 12 ⅝ inches / Water pot, 1959-1962, Stoneware, transparent and slip glaze, bands of rouletted decoration around the body and on rim, a coiled globular pot with a small, short, incised neck and flared rim 14 ¼ x 14 ⅜ inches
• fig 3. Installation view, Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art
• fig 4. Bisila Noha (Spain, 1988, lives and works in the United Kingdom) Reunion I, 2021, Terracotta 1, 10 ⅝ x 8 ⅞ x 4 ⅜ inches / Reunion XII, 2022, Terracotta, 10 ¼ x 9 ⅛ x 4 ⅛ inches / Two-Legged Vessel, 2020, Black stoneware, 6 ¾ x 5 ⅞ x 3 ⅜ inches / Two-Legged Vessel, 2020, Baney clay, 6 ¾ x 5 ⅞ x 3 ⅜ inches
• fig 5. Installation view – Doig Simmonds (United Kingdom, b. 1927, lives and works in the United Kingdom), 11 documentary photographs of Pottery Training Centre and Abuja, c. 1960s, Dimensions variable
• fig 6. Nigerian Modernism & the Pottery Training Centre, Abuja, 1950s-1970s, Installation view – Pottery Training Centre, Abuja archives wall vitrine
• fig 7. Ladi Kwali’s Internationalism: A Rupture in Nigerian Modernism, Installation view – Ladi Kwali archives wall vitrine
• fig 8. Installation view – left to right: Bisila Noha (Spain, 1988, lives and works in the United Kingdom), Installation view, left to right: Reunion I, 2021 / Reunion XII, 2022, Two-Legged Vessel, 2020, Black stoneware / Two-Legged Vessel, 2020, Baney clay | Adebunmi Gbadebo (United States, b. 1992, lives and works in the United States), Scott, Ida, 1892-1945, Asleep in Jesus, 2024 / True Blue Plantation, cemetery soil, shoe polish, Carolina Gold rice, white rice, pit-fired, 23 ¾ x 16 ½ x 16 inches | Phoebe Collings-James (United Kingdom, 1987, lives and works in the United Kingdom), Infidel [Scorpion], 2025, Glazed stoneware ceramic, 33 ⅞ x 17 ¾ x 17 ¾ inches / Infidel [knot song], 2025, Glazed stoneware ceramic on a blackened steel base, 29 ½ x 9 x 9 inches
• fig 9. Installation view – left to right: Simone Leigh (United States, b. 1967, lives and works in the United States), Village Series, 2023-2024, Stoneware, 59 x 47 inches | Adebunmi Gbadebo (United States, b. 1992, lives and works in the United States), Sam, 2023, Soil dug from True Blue Plantation, South Carolina, human hair, pit-fired 28 ½ x 16 x 15 inches
• fig 10. Installation view – left to right: Adebunmi Gbadebo (United States, b. 1992, lives and works in the United States), Scott, Ida, 1892-1945 / Asleep in Jesus, 2024, True Blue Plantation cemetery soil, shoe polish, Carolina Gold rice, white rice, pit-fired, 23 ¾ x 16 ½ x 16 inches | Phoebe Collings-James (United Kingdom, 1987, lives and works in the United Kingdom), Infidel [Scorpion], 2025, Glazed stoneware ceramic, 33 ⅞ x 17 ¾ x 17 ¾ inches / Infidel [knot song], 2025, Glazed stoneware ceramic on a blackened steel base, 29 ½ x 9 x 9 inches / Infidel [virtuosic], 2025, Glazed stoneware ceramic, 44 ⅛ x 12 ⅝ x 12 ⅝ inches
• fig 11. Installation view – left to right: Magdalene Odundo (Kenya, 1950, lives and works in the United Kingdom), Untitled #10, 1995, Earthenware, 21 ¼ x 12 inches / Symmetrical Reduced Black Narrow-Necked Tall Piece, 1990, Terracotta, 16 x 10 inches / Untitled #2 Vase (England), 1994, Slip-coated red clay, 21 ⅝ x 11 7/16 inches
• fig 12. Installation view – left to right: Simone Leigh (United States, b. 1967, lives and works in the United States), Village Series, 2023-2024, Stoneware, 59 x 47 inches | Adebunmi Gbadebo (United States, b. 1992, lives and works in the United States), Sam, 2023, Soil dug from True Blue Plantation, South Carolina, human hair, pit-fired, 28 ½ x 16 x 15 inches | Chinasa Vivian Ezugha (Nigeria, b. 1991, lives and works in the United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom), Installation view – Uro (Performance documentation for SPILL 2018), 2019/2025
• fig 13. Installation view, Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art
• fig 14. Installation view, Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art
• fig 15. Intergenerational Vessels & Matrilineal Influences, Installation view – Intergenerational – left to right: Anina Major (The Bahamas, b. 1981, lives and works in the United States), Salt Crusted Ribs, 2024, Glazed stoneware, sea glass, and sand, 10 ½ x 9 inches | Ladi Kwali (Nigeria, 1925-1984), Unglazed pot from Farnham demonstration, 1962, Earthenware, 14 ⅜ x 12 ⅝ inches | Halima Audu (b. unknown, d.1961), Jar, 1959, Stoneware, 11 ⅜ x 11 ⅜ inches | Bisila Noha (Spain, 1988, lives and works in the United Kingdom), Water Jug, 2021, Various stoneware clays and porcelain, 14 ⅛ x 10 ⅝ inches | Magdalene Odundo (Kenya, 1950, lives and works in the United Kingdom), Pot, 1979, Coiled pot with pointed base, bonfire fired with fired clay stand, 15 ¾ x 12 ⅜ inches
• fig 16. Installation view, Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art
• fig 17. Chinasa Vivian Ezugha (Nigeria, b. 1991, lives and works in the United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom), Installation view – Uro (Performance documentation for SPILL 2018), 2019/2025

La Première Fois – The First Time is on view at Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal

September 13 – October 25, 2025

Curated by Mel Arsenault

Featured artists: Mel Arsenault, Trevor Baird, Élise Provencher, Susan Collett, Shary Boyle, Dominique Sirois, Rebecca Ramsey, Philippe Caron Lefebvre, Linda Swanson, Kristen Morgin, Emily Yong Beck, Kuh Del Rosario

There are few materials as alive and versatile as clay. An inexhaustible tool for creation, constantly testing its own limits, it maintains an intimate relationship with the body that shapes it, unfolding in gestures of collaboration or resistance. Tactile, contradictory, and surprising, ceramics can be understood as a tangible and conceptual entanglement: the hand engages as much as the imagination. Its dynamic nature, often following stubborn trajectories, requires navigating both extreme precision and unpredictability.

La première fois – The First Time brings together the work of twelve artists whose distinct methodologies shape the singular languages of the medium, transforming clay into vases, plumbing, trompe-l’œil, narrative objects, or even chemical experiments. Through techniques such as drawing, collage, nerikomi, and raku, the exhibition highlights the endless possibilities that arise when earth meets fire.

Artist and curator Mel Arsenault was drawn to the contrasting proposals offered by an intergenerational group of artists, from here and abroad, guided by a strong intuition to highlight frank and bold voices. Guided by a spirit of admiration and exchange, the artists trace a wide spectrum of ceramic practice. The title La première fois – The First Time reflects both Arsenault’s first curatorial project and the gallery’s first group exhibition of ceramics, while also evoking the strong impression these works can make upon their initial encounter. The works of Trevor Baird, Élise Provencher, Susan Collett, Shary Boyle, Dominique Sirois, Rebecca Ramsey, Philippe Caron Lefebvre, Linda Swanson, Kristen Morgin, Emily Yong Beck, and Kuh Del Rosario are brought together not for their similarities but for the singularity of each artist’s vision.

Contact
info@galerienicolasrobert.com

Galerie Nicolas Robert
4653 St-Laurent Boulevard
Montréal (QC) H2T 1R2
Canada

Photos courtesy of the artists and Galerie Nicolas Robert

Captions

• Philippe Caron-Lefebvre, Bruit RVB (Bleu), 2025, Stoneware, glaze, 32 x 24 x 5 cm (12.6 x 9.4 x 2 “)
• Rebecca Ramsey, Blush and whisper, 2024, Glazed porcelain, bronze, epoxy, glazed stoneware, grout, kerdiboard, 94 x 106 x 5 cm (37 x 41.7 x 2 “)
• Dominique Sirois, Collage alchimique, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 51 x 36 x 4 cm (20.1 x 14.2 x 1.6 “)
• Susan Collett, Gust, 2025, Racine series, Porcelain paperclay & wire, multi-fired gold gilding, pearlescent, cement, 40.6 x 45.7 x 35.6 cm (16 x 18 x 14 “)
• Kuh Del Rosario, In the Badlands I am a spider, 2025, Glazed ceramic, egg shells, wax, demin, plaster, 25.5 x 26 x .5 cm (10 x 10.2 x 0.2 “)
• Emily Yong Beck, Sanrio Pot 2, 2025, Ceramic, glaze, painting, 38.1 x 33 x 31.8 cm (15 x 13 x 12.5 “)
• Trevor Baird, Large Vase 8, 2019, Porcelain, underglaze, glaze, 53.3 x 27.9 x 27.9 cm (21 x 11 x 11 “)
• Kristen Morgin, Untitled (Tips Cup), 2015, Unfired clay, paint, ink, nail, 14 x 11.4 cm (5.5 x 4.5 “)
• Mel Arsenault, Matin Cantaloup, 2025, Glazes on stoneware, 47 x 30 cm (18.5 x 11.8 “)
• Élise Provencher, Marcheuse de chiens, 2024, Ceramic, 38 x 62 x 41 cm (15 x 24.4 x 16.1 “)
• Shary Boyle, Nautilus, 2025, Raku test, Medalta. Glazes, 5 x 10 x 4 cm (2 x 3.9 x 1.6 “)
• Linda Swanson, Doubt Over Certainty, 2020, Glazed porcelain with copper, iron, nickel and rare earth oxides, 61.5 x 51 x 1 cm (24.2 x 20.1 x 0.4 “)

What Holds: Ceramic Boxes and the Language of Containment is on view at Vessels + Sticks, Toronto

September 25 – October 22, 2025

Vessels + Sticks, a newly opened contemporary ceramic art gallery is pleased to present its exhibition What Holds: Ceramic Boxes and the Language of Containment. On view from September 25 to October 22, 2025, the exhibition explores the enduring allure of the ceramic box and lidded form – not merely as utilitarian objects, but as vessels of meaning, ritual, and artistic expression.

Across cultures and centuries, the act of containment has carried profound significance: from the practical need to store and protect, to the symbolic safeguarding of memory, identity, secrecy, and spirit. In contemporary ceramics, the form continues to provoke: precise and imperfect, functional and symbolic, concealed and revealed. What Holds invites viewers to pause at that threshold: to consider the moment of opening, of looking inside, and how it shapes our perception, our rituals, and our relationships with the objects around us.

“What excites me most about this exhibition is how a seemingly simple lidded form can be transformed into something profoundly meaningful,” says Jennifer Kerbel Poirier, Founder and Director of Vessels + Sticks. “These works carry layers of history, emotion, and imagination, inviting us to reflect on what we choose to protect, conceal, or reveal – a question that feels particularly resonant in our everyday lives today.”

The exhibition brings together the work of six invited artists – Marissa Y. Alexander, Zimra Beiner, Bruce Cochrane, Jess Riva Cooper, Marc Egan, and Janet Macpherson – collectively, their practices span decades of research and experimentation. Additionally, 25 artists were selected through an international open call, presenting a wide range of interpretations to the exhibition statement and the box form. Selected artists include: Byron Ashley, Chloe Begg, Ariel Bullion Ecklund, Camila Capra, Sepideh Chegini, Wei Cheng, Rikki Cooper, Carolina Delgado Duruflé, Valentina Guevara, Ido Ferber, Loren Kaplan, Noe Kuremoto, Joshua Lue Chee Kong, Alexandra McCurdy, Tamarin Makarov, Colleen Dwyer Meloche, Zsuzsa Monostory, Vince Montague, Frances Neish, Ricca Okano, Abbey Peters, Bex Shaw, Talia Silva, Ulrika Strömbäck and Marlene Zagdanski.

“It is a privilege to present such a diverse group of artists whose practices push the boundaries of ceramic traditions while connecting to deeply human themes,” notes Jennifer.

With the recent opening of its Toronto gallery space at 112 Avenue Road, Vessels + Sticks, originally an online gallery, is committed to presenting exhibitions, both in-person and online, ensuring accessibility for its growing international audience of artists, collectors, and contemporary art enthusiasts. The gallery aims to expand the ceramic art collector base internationally, engaging new audiences and elevating clay within the broader conversations taking place in contemporary art and design.

From October 23 to 26, 2025, Vessels + Sticks will be participating in Art Toronto, Canada’s Art Fair, with an exhibition titled, “Constructed in Clay: Form and Structure” which examines the dynamic relationship between clay and architecture through sculptural ceramic works.

Contact
info@vesselsandsticks.com

Vessels + Sticks
112 Avenue Road
Toronto, Ontario M5R 2H4
Canada

Photos by Seth Stevenson

Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana is on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

October 11, 2025 – March 2, 2026

Organized by Sharon Hecker

From October 11 through March 2, 2026, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana, the first museum exhibition dedicated exclusively to the ceramic work of Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), one of the most innovative, and in his unique way irreverent, artists of the twentieth century. While Fontana is best known for his iconic, slashed and punctured canvases of the 1950s and ‘60s, this exhibition casts a spotlight on a lesser-known but essential part of his oeuvre: his work in clay, which he began in Argentina in the 1920s and continued to explore throughout his life. Organized by art historian Sharon Hecker, this is the first solo show to offer an in-depth examination of Fontanaʼs ceramic production. As Hecker notes: “Long associated with craft rather than fine art, today Fontanaʼs ceramics are receiving attention due to the resurgence of interest in the medium within contemporary art.”

Between suicide and travel, I chose the latter because I hope to still make a series of ceramics and sculptures that give me the pleasure or feeling of still being a living man.

Lucio Fontana

Through over seventy works, including several never previously exhibited, on loan from renowned public and private collections, the show seeks to illuminate the full scope of Fontanaʼs sculptural vision in clay, revealing how over the years he regarded it as a rich, generative site of experimentation. Fontanaʼs ceramic output is notable for its diversity of forms, techniques, and subject matter: from figurative sculptures of women, sea creatures, harlequins, and warriors to abstract forms, his approach to clay recaptured the age-old ritual of ceramic making combined with experimentation. His ceramic practice unfolded across several decades and different contexts: from his early work in Argentina to his return to Fascist Italy, to another long stay in Argentina, and again in Italy after World War II during reconstruction and the later economic boom. Fontana also made objects for private interiors, from plates to crucifixes, fireplaces, and doorhandles, often in collaboration with leading designers. Working with prominent Milanese architects, he created ceramic friezes for building facades and sculptures for churches, schools, cinemas, hotels, sports clubs, and tombs that still adorn the city today. The selection of works on view features both unique handmade works and serially produced objects, some of which blur the boundaries between the two categories.

The exhibition traces Lucio Fontanaʼs ceramic practice across two continents and four transformative decades, unfolding through a dynamic interplay of chronology and sculptural themes. His protean production ranges from expressive figurative sculptures—women, harlequins, sea creatures—to radically abstract forms, reflecting the diverse historical, social, political, and geographic contexts in which he lived and worked. Beginning with a first work made during his return to Argentina in 1926, following the trauma of fighting in World War I as a young man among the ragazzi del ‘99, the exhibition follows Fontana back to Fascist Italy where, in the early 1930s, he produced small, intimate terracottas—unglazed and dabbed with paint—like Ritratto di bambina (Portrait of a Girl, 1931) or Busto femminile (Female Bust, 1931), and then to his explosion of experiments with glazes thanks to his collaboration with local artisans in Albisola. Works from this period include the fascinating Coccodrillo (Crocodile, 1936–37), Medusa (1938–39), Donna seduta (Seated Woman, 1938), and the monumental Torso Italico (Italic Torso, 1938). During World War II, he again returned to Argentina and continued to make ceramics, before settling once more in postwar Italy, where the countryʼs reconstruction and economic boom paralleled his conceptual expansion in ceramics, including plates, crucifixes, and abstract sculptural forms that explored the origins of ceramic-making. A dedicated gallery presents Fontana’s deeply personal portraits of women in his life—from his wife, Teresita Rasini, and author and intellectual Milena Milani, the only woman to sign the Manifesto dello Spazialismo, to ceramicist Esa Mazzotti—revealing his intimate relationship with both his sitters and the medium itself. The exhibition emphasizes Fontanaʼs embrace of clayʼs physicality—smooth, rough, incised, raw, painted, glazed—highlighting his innovative mixing of the languages of art and craft, design and artisanship. Archival photographs capture the artist at work, offering a portrait of a collaborative maker deeply attuned to material, process, and place.

The show is accompanied by Lucio Fontana Ceramics in Milan, an original short film commissioned especially for the exhibition and created by Argentinian director Felipe Sanguinetti. Conceived as an integral part of the exhibition, the film takes viewers on a cinematic journey through different places in Milan—the Monumental Cemetery, the Church of San Fedele, the Istituto Gonzaga, the Museo Diocesano, Villa Borsani, as well as apartment buildings—examining the ceramic works that Fontana created in collaboration with leading Italian architects, including Osvaldo Borsani, Roberto Menghi, Mario Righini, and Marco Zanuso. Since these site-specific works are integrated into the cityʼs architectural and urban fabric, they cannot be exhibited in museum galleries. They are brought to life through this filmʼs powerful and captivating imagery.

Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana invites visitors to reconsider Fontana not only as a pioneer of Spazialismo and Conceptual Art but also as a materially engaged artist deeply attuned to the tactile and expressive potential of clay. The exhibition also raises new historical, material, and technical questions about Fontanaʼs ceramic practice, which one early critic defined as the artistʼs “other half” and “second soul.” In contrast to the prevailing, familiar image of Fontana as a lone, hypermasculine, heroic figure violently slashing his canvases, the exhibition reveals a more informal, intimate, collaborative side of the artist—rooted in clayʼs soft physicality and shaped by enduring relationships, such as the one with the ceramist and poet Tullio dʼAlbisola and the Mazzotti ceramic workshop in Albisola. As Hecker puts it, “clay emerges as a vessel for life-affirming experimentation, multiplicity, and generativity.”

A fully illustrated catalog, published by Marsilio Arte, features essays by curator Hecker, as well as Raffaele Bedarida, Luca Bochicchio, Elena Dellapiana, Aja Martin, Paolo Scrivano, and Yasuko Tsuchikane, all dedicated to Fontanaʼs ceramic practice and its historical, social, and cultural contexts. A rich program of free collateral events also accompanies the show, exploring and interpreting the artistʼs practice and visual idiom, organized with the support of Fondazione Araldi Guinetti, Vaduz. Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana is supported by Bottega Veneta.

Lucio Fontana was born February 19, 1899, in Rosario de Santa Fé, Argentina. His father was Italian and his mother Argentine. Fontana lived in Milan from 1905 to 1921 before moving back to Argentina, where he worked as a sculptor in his brother’s studio. In 1926, he participated in the first exhibition organized by Nexus, a group of young Argentine artists working in Rosario de Santa Fé. Upon his return to Milan in 1928, Fontana enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, which he attended for two years, studying under Adolfo Wildt. In 1930 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Il Milione in Milan

In Paris in 1935, he joined the Abstraction-Création group. The same year, he developed his skills in ceramics in Albisola, Italy, and later at the Sévres factory, near Paris. In 1939, he joined Corrente, a group of Milanese expressionist artists. In 1940, Fontana moved back to Buenos Aires where, in 1946, together with some of his students, he founded the Academia de Altamira and published the Manifiesto Blanco. Back in Milan in 1947, in collaboration with a group of writers and philosophers, he signed the Primo manifesto dello Spazialismo. He subsequently resumed his ceramic work in Albisola to explore these new ideas with his Concetti spaziali (1949–60).

The year 1949 marked a turning point in Fontanaʼs career. He created the Buchi, his first series of paintings featuring punctured canvases, as well as his first spatial environment, a combination of shapeless sculptures, fluorescent paintings, and blacklights to be viewed in a dark room. The latter work soon led him to employ neon tubing in ceiling decoration. In the early 1950s, he participated in Italian Art Informel exhibitions. During this decade, he experimented with various effects, such as slashing and perforating, in both painting and sculpture. The artist visited New York in 1961 during a show of his work at the Martha Jackson Gallery. In 1966, he designed opera sets and costumes for La Scala, Milan. In the last years of his career, Fontana became increasingly involved in the staging of his work in the many exhibitions that honored him worldwide, as well as in the idea of purity achieved in his last white canvases. These concerns were prominent at the 1966 Venice Biennale, for which he designed the environment for his works, and at the 1968 Documenta in Kassel. Fontana died on September 7, 1968, in Comabbio, Italy.

Contact
info@guggenheim-venice.it

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venice
Italy

Captions

• Installation views, Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana, 11.10.2025 – 02.03.2026, © Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Photos by Claudia Corrent
• Lucio Fontana, Medusa, 1938-1939, Glazed ceramic: black and gray, 38 x 28 x 15 cm. Verona, Palazzo Maffei Fondazione Carlon © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, by SIAE 2025
• Lucio Fontana, Crucifix, 1951, Glazed ceramic: black, amaranth, white and yellow, 50 x 35 x 18 cm. Karsten Greve, St. Moritz © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, by SIAE 2025
• Lucio Fontana, Portrait of Esa, Glazed ceramic: white, brown and pink, 57 x 43 x 27 cm. Collezione privata © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, by SIAE 2025
• Lucio Fontana, Crocodile, 1936-37, Glazed ceramic: green, red and yellow, 18 x 130 x 42 cm. Karsten Greve, St. Moritz © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, by SIAE 2025
• Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept, 1962-63, Slip-painted and painted terracotta with gash, 28 x 21 cm. Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, by SIAE 2025
• Lucio Fontana, Battle, 1947, Glazed ceramic: amaranth, light blue and turquoise, 15 x 39 x 21,5 cm. Karsten Greve, St. Moritz © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, by SIAE 2025