A Thing of Beauty
A Thing Of Beauty is a group show of eleven artists from different generations active from the 50s to today, brought together to highlight the enduring and extraordinary beauty of ceramics.
An exhibition spanning the entire twentieth century up to the present day brings together sculptural work displaying each artist’s aesthetic.
The apparent fragility, the rough-textures and the bright, lively tones in the work of Lucie Rie – often in contrast with the solidity of the stoneware – appears alongside the more experimental, abstract and monumental forms of Hans Coper.
Rose Cabat’s miniatures explode in a flourish of silky pink, purple, green and blue enamels.These masters of international ceramic art appear alongside Nanni Valentini and Carlo Zauli, two important sculptors who defined an era in Italian ceramics, and whose stylistic autonomy is juxtaposed with works by four Japanese artists.
The minimalist style and inimitable workmanship of Keiji Ito’s anthropomorphic sculptures with their archaic references, and Yasuhisa Kohyama’s full forms, seemingly sculpted by the wind, join Shingo Takeuchi’s hermetic sculptures and Kazuhito Nagasawa’s mysterious memory receptacles, in which clay merges with iron, glass and wood. Päivi Rintaniemi’s large, delicate sculptures express an alliance between power and fragility in her poetic synthesis of archaic form and minimalist design. A second Finnish artist is Kati Tuominen-Niittylä, whose “containers” recall Nordic forest landscapes while evoking the forms of buckets, sieves and baskets as traces of ancestral life.
An exhibition spanning the entire twentieth century up to the present day brings together sculptural work displaying each artist’s aesthetic.
Artists who defined the history of post-war ceramics feature alongside the delicately balanced forms and colours of Japanese ceramic art and artists from Northern Europe.
The apparent fragility, the rough-textures and the bright, lively tones in the work of Lucie Rie – often in contrast with the solidity of the stoneware – appears alongside the more experimental, abstract and monumental forms of Hans Coper.
Rose Cabat’s miniatures explode in a flourish of silky pink, purple, green and blue enamels.These masters of international ceramic art appear alongside Nanni Valentini and Carlo Zauli, two important sculptors who defined an era in Italian ceramics, and whose stylistic autonomy is juxtaposed with works by four Japanese artists.
The minimalist style and inimitable workmanship of Keiji Ito’s anthropomorphic sculptures with their archaic references, and Yasuhisa Kohyama’s full forms, seemingly sculpted by the wind, join Shingo Takeuchi’s hermetic sculptures and Kazuhito Nagasawa’s mysterious memory receptacles, in which clay merges with iron, glass and wood. Päivi Rintaniemi’s large, delicate sculptures express an alliance between power and fragility in her poetic synthesis of archaic form and minimalist design. A second Finnish artist is Kati Tuominen-Niittylä, whose “containers” recall Nordic forest landscapes while evoking the forms of buckets, sieves and baskets as traces of ancestral life.