Claydies and Ole Jensen: The Opening

Welcome to the opening Thursday 21 November 5 – 8 pm

On Saturday 23 November at 2 pm you are invited to an Artist Talk with Claydies and Ole Jensen.

Rostrum and ashtray. Jugs for water and wine. Beer-mugs and wineglasses. All ceramics. Danish designers Ole Jensen and Claydies lovingly take the exhibition-opening itself in hand as the theme at their shared exhibition at Copenhagen Ceramics. You are in for quite a different opening experience. Not to be missed!

Ceramists/ designers Ole Jensen and Claydies (Tine Broksø and Karen Kjældgård-Larsen) have each in their individual way always been working with things, that form part of a functional action or relate to a specific function. Conceptually, as well as concretely. The results have been utterly different. So, in their minds, they had no doubts that their collective exhibition at Copenhagen Ceramics should be about ceramics for use. In the process, the idea came up to take the phenomenon of the actual exhibition opening – with all its most typical accessories – as their pivotal point. They have divided the roles between them, without imposing on each other a particular idea of what the things should ’look like’.

For the opening on 21 November all things will be set up in their right place, installed in the gallery as artistic objects. Followingly the artefacts will be put to use, very directly, in an interaction with a hopefully very cheerful audience, eager to celebrate the things themselves – and possibly – yet another successful season of Copenhagen Ceramics? Also, during all of the exhibition period the public will be invited to use and try out the various objects in the show.

In more aspects, over the last decade and more, the designduo Claydies has been this dual-headed singular body ( their own expression). They pay homage to the small, fantastic trivialities of everyday life in both their design work and art projects. Over time, they have offered many surprising and original ways to look at functional ceramics. For example: Claydies and Gentlemen, their ceramic coiffure catwalk in 2003 at the then Gallery Nørby; Dogma 07, a ceramics manifesto, where cups and saucers, jugs and plates were all modelled while being blindfolded, and Tradition in Trance, an exhibition at Stavanger in Norway in 2008, where the duo, in their capacity of being New Nordic Food ambassadors, took up the traditional Danish ’rawmaterial’, slip-decorated earthenware, as their inspiration for new functional expressions.

The very special merit of Claydies lies in their ability to transform many of their conceptual ideas of the art projects into design and production of useful items for contemporary everyday use. In ceramics as well as in other materials.

Ole Jensen, doesn’t need a large scale presentation either. A look at his website clearly shows his extraordinary, highly varied contributions as designer of precisely the ordinary – in the proper sense of the word. His unusual talent is his ability to seriously reconsider all the truisms about the relationship between form and function and to come up with new interpretations in designs of conceptual clarity, humour and made with great love for his subject matter. This makes him – already long ago – one of the important innovators in our time of the daily functional artefacts.

All works by Ole Jensen in this show were made during a guest professorship at Alfred University in New York State in the autumn of 2013, during which same period Claydies also made a visit to the college, holding a workshop and lecturing.

It is, therefore, a very special pleasure indeed, to welcome professor Anne Currier, Chair of Division of Ceramic Art, School of Art and Design at Alfred University to Copenhagen, where she will be opening the exhibition on 21 November at 5 – 8 pm.