MEET THE ARTISTS
Steen Ipsen
Steen Ipsen presents a new characteristic ‘blobject’ form of hand-built gloss-black glazed elliptical forms, strung together with black PVC strands. Despite the form’s sleek and refined aesthetic, the sculpture has a biomorphic feel, as if something discovered only under a microscope, the PVC binding adds tension that contributes a sense of throbbing movement.
Anders Herwald Ruhwald
Anders Herwald Ruhwald is a Danish-American sculptor. He works primarily in clay, a medium he has been drawn to since he was 15. Ruhwald’s work blends references from functional objects to classical sculpture and can take the form of singular objects as well as immersive installations.
His works is the included collections of Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Art Institute of Chicago, US, amongst many others.
Annelie Stokke Grimwade
Annelie Stokke Grimwade is a multidisciplinary artist of Swedish Sámi and British descent, currently based in Denmark. Her practice spans sculpture, performance, and writing. Her work delves into themes of oppression through a lens of ambiguity, using a kaleidoscopic approach to explore social and environmental issues.
Annalie is currently artist-in-residence at V&A London.
Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl
Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl’s ceramic works are dealing with fundamental sculptural presence in space. They are basically non-narrative but strongly rely on the capacity of the form itself to transfer emotional content
to the viewer. The works present themselves as spatial drawings, pure sculptural movements.
Kaldahl graduated with an MA in ceramics and glass from the Royal College of Art, London (1990). His works are represented in many public and private collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.
Turi Heisselberg Pedersen
“In recent years, I have developed a sculptural expression where the forms resemble the irregular asymmetrical structures and orders found in nature, e.g., strict crystal forms or growing organic structures. These are not direct reproductions of nature, but rather abstractions over states and forms in nature, or of different stages of the movement from the origin and growth of things to decomposition and decay.”
The works are modelled in stoneware clay and glazed with slip glaze, which gives a dry stone-like surface with a rich texture. The angular shapes fight against the nature of the clay, and you sense the hand built. In this way, the angular shapes take on a softer look, leading the mind towards natural forms rather than constructions.
Photo (above): by Erik Balle
Lotte Westphael
Lotte Westphael is best known for her epically thin, tangibly fragile porcelain cylinders, built of rippling colour gradients and gridded slip joins that appear to work against gravity. All Danish ceramicists work in the shadow of a rich national history, but Westphael’s work combines far-reaching interests and influences. This includes apprenticeships in Japan.
“I internalised the appreciation of the teabowl after attending a tea ceremony, its whole story is in the surface”.
Artist Photo by Kirstine Mengel
Photo (above): by Kasper Agergaard
Heidi Hentze
Heidi Hentze investigates porcelain and glaze in meticulously assembled paper-thin clay constructions. Based on inspiration from architecture and kirigami, she challenges, with her skilled technical ability: material, gravity, and classic slab techniques.
Morten Løbner Espersen
“The vessel is my object of choice. An archetypical form I’ve spent 20 years making variations on, from the functional and modest, to the aesthetic and sumptuous. Clay is my material of choice, because it contains so many possibilities: a plastic, amorphous material of incomparable formability that can be fired into imperishable, precise forms.”
Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen
Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen lives and works on a farm in the woods around Silkeborg. Pernille’s ceramic work is rich, strong, and powerful. It has been widely displayed in Denmark as well as at international exhibitions.
Throughout her artistic practice Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen draws her inspiration from nature, literature, and mythology. Her artistic practice is experimental, and she challenges herself by intentionally failing and reimagining her own approach to the materials.
Marie Herwald Hermann
Marie Herwald Hermann (born 1979, Copenhagen, Denmark) lives and works in Chicago. Hermann received her MFA from Royal College of Art in London in 2009.
Hermann creates boldly saturated, impeccably rendered domestic items to highlight the automatic nature of modern life, the things owned and used without notice.
Jørgen Haugen Sørensen (1934 – 2021)
Jørgen Haugen Sørensen was one of Denmark’s most eminent sculptors. Throughout his artistic career he consistently and independently focused his attention on the human condition in society. Haugen Sørensen was a self-taught sculptor. He saw a comparison between the construction of poetry and stone carving, believing they share similar thought patterns and slow processes.
Malene Hartmann Rasmussen
Malene Hartmann Rasmussen works within the field of narrative figurative sculpture and installation. A recurring theme is the forest and mythological creatures that lurk in the dark woods. She weaves together notions of memories, daydreams and childhood nostalgia into a fairy-tale of her own making. Hartmann Rasmussen’s interest in the forest stems from its recurrence in European literature and myth, ancient cults, pagan rituals, and as a metaphor for the hidden realms of the unconscious mind.
Photo (above): Sylvain Deleu
Contemporary Danish Ceramic is supported by the Danish Art Foundation
