GROTTO
Katarina Egsgaard (DK)
9 April to 16 May 2026.
Exhibition opening on Thursday, 9 April, from 16.00 to 19.00
Opening speech at 17.00 by Katarina Egsgaard, followed by musical reflections performed by Poul Høxbro on the ancient Chinese clay flute the xun
‘You’re not allowed to draw on the walls. And I never did! But others have – since the beginning of time: in caves and temples, on trains and toilets. Indoors and outdoors. Drawings on top of drawings and reaching across time. Now it’s my turn – in ceramic!
According to an old German saying, there’s no reason to paint the devil on the wall – he’s bound to show up anyway. Perhaps he’s already here? Maybe you should stop by to check for yourself?
All the warning lights are on these days. Danger lurks just around the corner. But so does play. Colour. And spring ...’
GROTTO is a ceramic mixed-media installation improvising on public wall pieces across time – fusing prehistoric cave paintings with contemporary street art.
The exhibition is intended as a sort of oversized conversation piece consisting of compositions of ceramic elements, photos and ready-mades. It interprets individual moments, such as fight, flight and fetch and playfully explores similarities between the two expressions – cave paintings and street art – in sculptural and ceramic expressions.
The installation is based on the classic naturalist figurative tradition and topics from cave painting, animals in motion, with surfaces and colours that draw inspiration from street art: ‘I use the skeleton as my basic structure, exploring how it changes across species and evolution. These are slow processes compared to the dynamic transformation of topic, colour and materials in street art. My focus is on the transformation of metamorphosing structures and surfaces. – And of course, a ceramic figure is always a cave.’
‘GROTTO aims to create a contemporary ceramic cave painting that gives you a sense of standing in a living flow of signs and images. That reminds me of our basic desire to reach out to each other across time – and that gives me hope.’
The exhibition is accompanied by the illustrated folder GROTTO, which invites the audience to add their own drawings.
Katarina Egsgaard (b.1978) experiments with storytelling ceramic images based on the classic naturalist figurative tradition.
She holds an MA in Ceramic Form from the Royal Danish Academy from 2020 with a BA from the Academy’s department on Bornholm. She has taken private lessons in classic drawing and modelling and holds a BA in Musicology from the University of Copenhagen.
She has been awarded grants from the Danish Arts Foundation, Danmarks Nationalbank’s Anniversary Foundation and Grosserer L.F. Foghts Fond as well as a residency at the Danish Art Workshops. She has taken part in group exhibitions the Johannes Larsen Museum (DK), Clay Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark (DK), Politikens Hus (DK) and Pillnitz Palace (DE), among other venues. In addition to a solo exhibition in collaboration with Danish Dance Theatre, she has created two large-scale installations, of which Alive and Kicking in Cph, 2022, at Officinet in Copenhagen received an award from the Danish Arts Foundation. GROTTO is her third solo exhibition.
Poul Høxbro is an internationally acclaimed flautist. His repertoire spans from Viking Age music to experimental contemporary music. Among other instruments, he specializes in the Chinese clay flute the xun and was the first western musician to introduce it into classical western music.
The exhibition has received support from L.F. Foghts Fond and the Danish Arts Foundation’s Committee for Craft and Design Project Funding.
