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Around the world in six exhibitions
The Marianne Heller gallery is now coming up to its thirty
third year – and even after a third of a century, the Heidelberg
gallery owner is still following a consistently progressive path.
Through her work, which is both determined and prepared to take
risks in equal measure, she enjoys the established reputation of
being the foremost address in Germany for international contemporary
ceramics. To put it bluntly: this is no federal German institution
- no museum would be able to compete with what is on show in the
spacious rooms of the prestigious flat-roofed building in the Stadtgarten
park all year round in terms of international ceramics: given the
generally dire financial situation, no museum or institution is
still able to be so expansive or even approach such a commitment
to the field of ceramics. How a private individual such as Marianne
Heller is able to put together her program again and again is both
admirable and puzzling. The fact is: nowhere else in German-speaking
countries can such stars be encountered or new discoveries made,
brought together from all over the ceramic globe. Anyone who has
a soft spot for the genre cannot avoid choosing the metropolis on
the river Neckar as their travel destination several times a year,
or at least planning a stopover there to visit the gallery. And
the fact that this will be no different in 2011 is ensured by the
new calendar of events with exhibits from the USA, Japan, Germany,
the Czech Republic, Brazil and Scotland. And incidentally, the fact
that last year Marianne Heller was elected to the Council of the
International Academy of Ceramics (IAC) in Geneva, must be seen
as recognition of her commitment: Congratulations!
The first special exhibition from 20th February to 3rd April will
be a real highlight for all friends of Japanese ceramics and the
aesthetics of woodfiring: after about two and a half years,
Isezaki Jun from Japan and Jeff Shapiro
from the USA return with a joint exhibition of their latest works.
Isezaki Jun, who was nominated a “Living National Treasure”
in 2004 – the highest accolade that a Japanese ceramist can
receive – is part of the Bizen tradition, which has been unbroken
for seven centuries: unglazed stoneware in traditional forms, exposed
simply to the embers and ash in long tunnel kilns, often with patterns
of salt-impregnated straw burnt on. However much Isezaki Jun owes
to these roots, he has nevertheless carefully personalised the wealth
of forms in his own distinctive way, for example in his winged rectangular
vases with irregular feet. Even more extreme in their surfaces encrusted
with ash deposits and their sculptural appearance are the angular
works of the American Jeff Shapiro. Having worked for many years
in Japan and now living in New York, Shapiro is regarded as one
of the foremost Western developers of the technique of woodfiring.
The exhibition series reaches its experimental peak between 10th
April and 22nd May. Students of Prof. Kerstin Abraham at
the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel have
used the simple title “Tea table” as the impetus to
gain an insight into metaphorical dimensions from it – their
works will concern the culture and sociology of tea-drinking. Apart
from usable tea sets, small installations will stage tea tables
and tea landscapes which provoke thoughts about social intercourse
and customs. Tea makers and thermos flasks are addressed as art
objects in the same way as the casualness of drinking tea during
a computer-guided rocket attack in the Afghan war. Kerstin Abraham’s
own contribution will be a tribute to the decorated teapots of Hedwig
Bollhagen, draped on the faience slab of a small ash table... Together
with the Kiel adepts, the English ceramist Julian Stair
and the Korean Young-Jae Lee, who is the manager
of the ceramic workshop in Margaretenhöhe, Essen, will also
be exhibiting. Both of them teach the Kiel students as visiting
lecturers. Julian Stair is famous for his enigmatic still lives
of tea bowls and pots made of green or red stoneware or white porcelain,
remotely auratic ensembles, which in their formal clarity symbolise
the ritual of serving - Young-Jae Lee’s finely glazed bowls,
also often presented in installations, celebrate the nuance, that
crucial tiny difference, which makes individuals of identical things.
The series of exhibitions of ceramics from the Czech Republic continues
in the next show which takes place from 19th June to 31st July:
“Between Prague and Budweis” presents new works by Pavel
Drda, Elzbieta Grosseová, Jiri Laštovicka, Tomáš
Proll, Eva Slavíková and, as a guest of the
Czechs, the Japanese ceramist Kaku Hayashi. Once
again, the deeper meaning and irony of the Eastern Europeans, and
also the pressing concern about the human existential situation,
will find expression in the most diverse forms of abstraction and
time and again in the human figure, whilst Kaku Hayashi, with his
series of works inspired by the philosophy of Zen or by ephemeral
natural phenomena, is searching for a universal symbolic language.
Japanese ceramics remain a focal point: following the highly gratifying
co-operation last year with the Yufuku Galery inTokyo,
another guest show from the Tokyo gallery can be seen from 4th September
to 9th October with four Japanese ceramists: Atsushi Takagaki’s
crinkled vessels, coated with finely crazed celadon, which provide
a fine contrast to the copper-red surfaces and edges – Takuo
Nakamura’s rough stoneware vessels and plates, which
he partly coats with the exuberant paintwork which stems from Kutani
porcelain decoration – Katsumi Kako’s
constructed stoneware vessels with their understated, archaic-seeming
designs – Yoko Imada’s sweeping porcelain
bowls with flowing, clear glaze.
The gallery will enter new ceramic territory from 23rd October to
27th November: although the ceramist pair Elizabeth Fonseca
and Gilberto Paim work in Brazil, with their linear-geometrically
decorated porcelain and stoneware vases, they are more along the
lines of the work of Lucie Ries or of Scandinavian design. Even
though they are created south of the equator, unexpected coolness,
formal severity and reserved colouring define these invariably functional
works which are also decorative in the best sense of the word.
The end of the year and the bridge to 2012 is formed by the exhibition
from 11th December to 29th January of the irritating, and at the
same time touching, sculptures by the Scots artist Susan
O`Byrne – animal sculptures which show individual
animals – fox, cheetah, gazelle... – as if they are
taken out of a narrative situation, magical creatures from the realm
of fables, vulnerable and gaunt, yet subtly dappled at the same
time, which is the result of the way they are created by making
a wire framework to which porcelain paper clay is applied –
not realistic, but with a dream-like reality.
Dr. Walter Lokau, Leipzig
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January
1, 2011 - December 31, 2011