Edmund de Waal has curated an exhibition of acclaimed Danish ceramicist, Axel Salto (1889–1961), considered one of the greatest masters of twentieth-century ceramic art.
Edmund de Waal has curated an exhibition of acclaimed Danish ceramicist, Axel Salto (1889–1961), considered one of the greatest masters of twentieth-century ceramic art.
The exhibition is 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 will tour to the Kunstsilo in September 2024 before its final stop at The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in 2025.
This exhibition brings 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 are being 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: Ole Akhøj
In this major retrospective of the work of Rudolf Levy, co-organised by the MPK and the Uffizi, Levy's last self-portrait is juxtaposed with Edmund de Waal's 2016 piece, spur.
this must be the place, a major new exhibition of de Waal's vitrines and stone benches, was installed at Gagosian's West 24th Street space.
this must be the place, a major new exhibition of de Waal's vitrines and stone benches, was installed at Gagosian's West 24th Street space.
De Waal relates: “For the last two years my studio has been full of silver, steel, marble, and porcelain. This new body of work is about place—where things come from, where they belong, what we remember and pass on. The materials echo places. I use porcelain clay from Limoges but turn it black with oxides and inscribe it with remembered poetry. I use marble from Kilkenny and push folded sheets of silver into crevices like prayers into a wall. The work is full of fragments, scraps of silver on the rims of bowls, poems, music, echoes of people that matter to me and the places where they lived. These sculptures are new places.”
this must be the place was complemented by the presentation of to light, and then return— at Gagosian’s gallery at 976 Madison Avenue, New York, from September 14 to October 28, 2023. This exhibition featured sculptures by de Waal and platinum prints and tintypes by Sally Mann that each artist created in response to the other’s work.
Photography: Alzbeta Jaresova
An exhibition of new works by Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann, inspired by each other’s practices, was installed Gagosian's Madison Avenue space. to light, and then return— marked the first time the two artists have shown together in a dedicated exhibition.
An exhibition of new works by Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann, inspired by each other’s practices, was installed Gagosian's Madison Avenue space. to light, and then return— marked the first time the two artists have shown together in a dedicated exhibition.
The result of an ongoing exchange between two artists, who are also celebrated writers, the exhibition was titled after the final line of The spry arms of the wind (c. 1866), a poem written by Emily Dickinson on an envelope scrap. Informed by their mutual fascination with material transformation and themes of elegy and historical reckoning, the works on view included de Waal’s sculptural installations featuring porcelain and other materials, and Mann’s tintypes and platinum prints.
to light, and then return— was complemented by this must be the place, an exhibition of new works by de Waal at 541 West 24th Street, New York, from 13 September until 28 October 2023.
Photography:
De Waal's work: Alzbeta Jaresova
Mann's work: © Sally Mann, Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy Gagosian