Terres: Copenhagen Ceramics Invites – On show at Galerie Maria Lund in Paris:

Marianne Nielsen: Daffodil, 32 cm, hand built  glazed stoneware, 2013
Photo Jeppe Gudmundsen-Holmgreen

Press Release:

On show at GALERIE MARIA LUND
48 rue de Turenne
75003 Paris

Terres – Copenhagen Ceramics Invites

Turi Heisselberg Pedersen, Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl, Morten Løbner Espersen, Andreas Schulenburg, Pernille Pontoppidan Petersen, Kristine Tillge Lund, Emmanuel Boos, Bente Skjøttgaard, Yasser Ballemans, Marianne Nielsen, Farida Le Suavé, Karen Bennicke, Esben Klemann, Wayne Fischer, Akiko Hoshina

22 June – 14 September 2013*

As a selected project within the context of Nouvelles Vagues- The season of young curators at the PALAIS DE TOKYO in Paris, curator Margaux Brugvin in close collaboration with Copenhagen Ceramics presents a show of 15 artists at GALERIE MARIA LUND, demonstrating the broad spectrum of artistic expressions of the contemporary ceramic medium

Copenhagen Ceramics is pleased to announce this extraordinary exhibition, which is the result of a close collaboration with Parisian Galerie Maria Lund and curator Margaux Brugvin. The show is selected by PALAIS DE TOKYO in Paris as one of a series of gallery exhibitions in and around Paris for the context of Nouvelles Vagues – The Season of Young Curators.

The show TERRES – COPENHAGEN CERAMICS INVITES wants to pay homage to the initiative behind Copenhagen Ceramics by giving even more visibility to the scene of contemporary ceramics, that the Copenhagen gallery is highlighting through its programme, whether the artists are Danish or from elsewhere.

The aim is to show how, at the age of the digital and dematerialization, clay - profoundly linked to the cultural tradition and the concept of handwork - continues to inspire, to reinvent itself, and pushes artists toward new experimentations.

The fifteen selected artists work in Denmark, the Netherlands, England, the United States, as well as in France. TERRES puts forward an overview of the diversity and quality of artists working with ceramics, whether they come from a fine arts or applied arts training. Thus, different artistic approaches are used by the selected artists:

The sensuality of glazes

Some explore the richness and sensuality of the material, the glazing, the engobes, leaning towards an abstract expressionism: the stoneware interlacings of Bente Skjøttgaard evoke cotton-wool clouds of rain, bushes or mineral formations; the glazing of the Magic Mushrooms of Morten Løbner Espersen take on psychedelic aspects; the organic, sensual and distant ‘bodies’ of Turi Heisselberg Pedersen are covered in a second skin of clay with a matte, velvety and luminous aspect ; the formats of Emmanuel Boos are a pretext to explore the unfathomable and jubilatory matter that is glaze ; Wayne Fischer’s white and fleshy, eminently erotic shapes call for the touch, the caress, suggesting a certain mystery.

Modelling formalism

The works of other artists, on the contrary, deal with formal abstraction, to which this infinitely flexible medium lends itself particularly well: thus, Karen Bennicke elaborates absurd architectures where creative freedom and mathematical rigor cohabitate; Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl analyses a series of ‘ordinary’, industrial objects, in a purely plastic approach; Esben Klemann creates series of light structures, « impossible » given the weight of the earth, where the systematics of the series is disrupted by the uncertainty of chemical reactions.

The cultural link to ceramics

Some very directly, but with humour and lightness - attack the preconceptions in which their medium is tangled up: the functional dimension of industrial ceramics is explored in the ready-mades and diversions of Kristine Tillge Lund, thus revealing the omnipresence of the material in our daily life; the decorative aspects of earth are unravelled by Marianne Nielsen, who, while isolating traditional decorative elements, transforms them into objects of study of our cultural relationship to Nature; the kitsch of the popular use of ceramics is mocked by Andreas Schulenburg, whose protean work analyses the notion of good and bad taste by taking a different view on the bucolic world of the traditional figurine; Yasser Ballemans, finally, creates works that ‘pretend’ to have a function, a use : the last in date are a series of porcelain carts, lopsided and playful, that take inspiration in the carnival and overflow with references to art history.

The field of intimacy

The artists of this last category have made of clay a vehicle for intimate confessions: Akiko Hoshina invents rituals to transform the clothes, symbols of a love story, into relics; Pernille Pontoppidan creates an intuitive process of composite works that encompass entire cabinets of curiosities, accumulations of potentials stories, fragments of stories and emotions; and finally, the flesh-colored specimens of Farida Le Suavé explore the intimacy of the body in its moving and sensual clumsiness, curves and cavities, embodying the desperate bursts to exchange with the outside.

Publications:

An issue of PALAIS, the PALAIS DE TOKYO magazine will be devoted to all the exhibitions selected for Nouvelle vague - the season of young curators. The GALERIE MARIA LUND is preparing a publication of a catalogue dedicated to TERRES, including a text by philosopher Yves Michaud and presenting each of the exhibited artists.

For more information or the provision of visuals: www.copenhagenceramics.com/html/press_2013.html
or please contact Galerie Maria Lund: Maria Lund, Marion Bahy-Baril or Margaux Brugvin.

GALERIE MARIA LUND
48 rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
T (+33) 01 42 76 00 33
M (+33) 06 61 15 99 91
E galerie@marialund.com
www.marialund.com

Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12 noon – 7pm

Please note:
Annual closure of GALERIE MARIA LUND:
28 July to 2 September 2013

21.11 – 14.12
Claydies and Ole Jensen