Friday 28 February, from 6pm

Join us for the opening night preview of ‘Contemporary Danish Ceramics’.

Denmark is a nation steeped in design history, with strong associations to celebrated ceramic manufacture. This history has projected a specific Danish style and aesthetic that has become world recognised. The blue and white signature of Royal Copenhagen and Bing & Grøndahl wares, the sleek modernism of designers such as Arne Jacobsen (the Ant, Swan and Egg chairs) and Verner Panton (the Panton chair), and the expressive ceramics of Thorvald Bindesbøll, Gertrud Vasegaard and Axel Salto.

The importance given to creative exploration in Denmark’s early education system has formed a culture that values skill, the well-made and aesthetically considered and through this, designers, makers and artists have created globally influential styles and objects, still present in contemporary visual culture. Typically, clay and ceramic have been a medium and material associated largely with craft and design, and distantly to architecture. However, the artistic and sculptural potential of the material has been increasingly explored by artists eager to create, outside of the material’s historic load. They do so with the same sense of ambition for newness and dynamic innovation as the groundbreaking designers and artists before them, whilst maintaining an exceptional level of material expertise and attention to detail.

This exhibition showcases the broad spectrum of contemporary making with clay in Denmark. Demonstrating a boundary breaking approach to the material of ceramic, the exhibited artists embrace the full potential of clay as a sculptural material, both in ambitious form and scale, and in the application and integration of colour, pattern and texture. The exhibition includes vessel-based objects, figurative and narrative sculpture and abstracted geometric and biomorphic sculptural forms from twelve leading Danish artists: Anders Herwald Ruhwald, Annelie Grimwade Olofson, Heidi Hentze, Jørgen Haugen Sørensen, Lotte Westphael, Marie Herwald Hermann, Malene Hartmann Rasmussen, Martin Bodilson-Kaldahl, Morton Løbner Espersen, Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen, Steen Ipsen and Turi Heisselberg Pederson.