This year-long exhibition unfolds across three locations at The Huntington: the Art Gallery, the Chinese Garden and the Japanese Garden. De Waal presents a series of new site-specific installations exploring memory, cultural exchange and the movement of ideas through porcelain and place.
This year-long exhibition unfolds across three locations at The Huntington: the Art Gallery, the Chinese Garden and the Japanese Garden. De Waal presents a series of new site-specific installations exploring memory, cultural exchange and the movement of ideas through porcelain and place.
Photography: Josh White
The Hepworth Wakefield is the final stop for this touring exhibition, curated by Edmund de Waal and bringing together his own work and that of acclaimed Danish ceramicist, Axel Salto.
The Hepworth Wakefield is the final stop for this touring exhibition, curated by Edmund de Waal and bringing together his own work and that of acclaimed Danish ceramicist, Axel Salto.
The exhibition was the result of a collaboration between Edmund de Waal, CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark and Kunstsilo in Norway. Starting at CLAY in Middelfart, Denmark, it toured to the Kunstsilo in September 2024.
This exhibition brought together a significant number of Salto’s ceramic works from the CLAY Museum and The Tangen Collection at Kunstsilo, the world’s largest collection of Nordic modernist art. Salto’s ceramics were shown alongside his lesser-known and unseen works on paper, illustrations, writings and textiles, and a major new installation by de Waal which reflects on Salto’s enduring influence.
“Axel Salto is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. He created a unique body of ceramic work that continues to fascinate me. His sculptures seem to be on the point of change: glazes are caught in flux. Vases swell as if to burst. He cared about the ways that patterns change course, shift energies, how an animal becomes a person, a man metamorphoses into a stag. Ovid ran powerfully through his life. That moment of change, transformation, is the moment when poetry occurs.”
- Edmund de Waal
Photography: Michael Pollard
Featuring porcelain vessels in gilded vitrines, if you came this way explored memory, devotion, and material transformation. Gold leaf applied to oak and brushed liquid porcelain create luminous surfaces that recall reliquaries and Proto-Renaissance imagery, inviting slow contemplation.
Opening this March, Artists for Kettle’s Yard is a selling exhibition bringing together artworks by leading contemporary and 20th-century artists donated to support the Jim and Helen Ede Fund, marking Kettle’s Yard’s approach to its 70th anniversary. De Waal's piece, tristia, I (2025), will be on show alongside works from artists such as Antony Gormley, Rana Begum to Ben Nicholson and Lucie Rie.