PAST EXHIBTIONS - 2023

There is constantly something happening

Caroline Slotte (FI) and Gitte Jungersen (DK)
13 April – 20 May 2023

Ceramics can be transformed in a split second if they are accidentally dropped and shatter. Or they can be slowly worn down – touched by hands, scratched by cutlery, their surface eroded by wind and weather. From the moment of creation, any object is also an incipient ruin, since, just as there is a ‘before’, there will also be an ‘after’. Over time, the objects are going to break up completely and enter into new physical manifestations. 

Caroline Slotte’s works begin with antique porcelain plates. She sandblasts, grinds and cuts her way into the material, bringing new poetic images out of the familiar utilitarian objects. In her series Tracing, a miniature sandstorm has swept the original pieces, removing layer after layer of material. A landscape painted in cobalt blue, a sky, a cloud, a tiny person – the image is slowly eroded away, turning into white dust on the workshop floor. The flat blue painted scene gradually transforms into something akin to an imprint or an X-ray image, as if a memory of the image had sunk into the surface and is now slowly emerging as a three-dimensional recollection. In Under Blue Skies, all that remains is a few blue clouds. The clouds, which were originally added as background on the outer edge of the central image, move to the foreground, now accompanied by an outline of the elements that have been eroded away: a church, a tree, a floral border. The vanished areas can be glimpsed as negative forms in the white porcelain body.  

In Gitte Jungersen’s large glaze objects, creation and destruction seem like two extremes that are closely connected. Piece #2 and Piece #3 consist of different glazes poured out in thick layers. Usually, even on a large sculpture, the glaze is only present as a thin layer, but here, the glazes take on a format that mirrors the human body. Like a blown-up detail or something seen through a microscope. All the glazes are coloured with cobalt oxide, which in the chemical make-up of the different glazes unfolds in varying colour shades and textures, from a greyish blue lava-like mass to a deep blue high-gloss shine. Glaze comes into being when different raw minerals coalesce and transform, becoming something new as a result of the firing’s dramatic, destructive and disintegrating forces. The transformation which occurs during the firing is retained as a frozen moment of a dynamic dimension that is felt and attracts like a quivering undertone in the finished work.

Caroline Slotte (b. 1975 in Helsinki, Finland) trained at Design School Kolding (1995–98) and the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD) at the University of Bergen (2001–03). Slotte also holds a PhD in artistic research from KMD, Universitety of Bergen (2007–11). From 2017 to 2022, Slotte was a professor of ceramic art at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Selected exhibitions: Ceramics Facing the New, Espoo Museum of Modern Art, 2021; Broken Nature, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2020–21; Riska & Slotte, Gallery Format, Oslo, 2018; Revive, Remix, Respond, The Frick Pittsburgh, 2018, Visioning Future: Cheongju Craft Biennale, 2017; PAGES, Konsthantverkarna, Stockholm, 2016; My Blue China!, Bernardaud Foundation, Limoges, 2015; Zwinger und Ich, Bomuldsfabrikken Kunsthall, Arendal, 2015; Solo, Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo, 2014; Tenderness, Galleri F15, Moss, 2013; New Blue-and-White, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2013; Making Knowledge, Gustavsbergs Konsthall, Stockholm, 2012; Thing Tang Trash, KODE, Bergen, 2011; Object Factory, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, 2009. Selected representation: Museum of Modern Art, New York (US), Museum of Arts and Design, New York (US), Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK), Musée Ariana, Geneva (CH), National Museum of Scotland (UK), Nasjonalmuseum, Oslo (NO), KODE Art Museums, Bergen (NO), Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (SE), Röhsska Museum, Gothenburg (SE), Design Museum, Helsinki (FI)

Gitte Jungersen (b. 1967) graduated from the Danish Design School (now the Royal Danish Academy) in 1993. Selected exhibitions: RUIN, solo exhibition at Officinet, Copenhagen, 2022; Bend, Bubble and Shine, Hostler Burrows NY and Los Angeles, 2021; Ceramic Works, A. Petersen, Copenhagen 2019; Crafted Matter, Cheongju Crafts Biennale, Korea, 2019; Ceramic Momentum, CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, Middelfart, 2019; People Who Pot, MDR Gallery, London, 2019 Mindcraft 18, San Simpliciano, Milan, 2018; Tilstedet, solo exhibition in Bagsværd Church, 2017; Ultimate Impact, the Round Tower, Copenhagen, 2017; Glaze – Chemistry, Mass and Myth, Sophienholm, Lyngby, 2017; Fireworks, Gustavsbergs Konsthall, Stockholm, 2016; Zwinger und Ich, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthal, Arendal, 2015; Setting the Stage, Copenhagen Ceramics, 2012; Thing Tang Trash, KODE Art Museums, Bergen, 2011.  Representation: Musee Ariana, Geneva (CH), Nordenfjeldske (NO), Public Art Agency Sweden, Stockholm (S), Nationalmuseet, Stockholm (S), KODE Art Museums Bergen (NO), Danish Arts Foundation (DK), McManus Galleries, Scotland (UK), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark (DK), Designmuseum Danmark (DK), New Carlsberg Foundation. Awards and grants: Danmarks Nationalbank’s Anniversary Foundation’s appreciation grant 2020, Ole Haslunds Hæderslegat 2008, Danish Arts Foundation’s three-years working grant 2000.

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Out of Pocket 

Kristine Tillge Lund (DK)

23 February – 1 April 2023

Curated in collaboration with visual artist Owen Armour.

Imagine the sound of a car door slamming. And then another. A whole series of car doors slamming, endlessly. Hollow, sharp, muted, loud. An engineered sound. And then: silence. Even the silence inside the car is part of its design, marking a short break from the outside world, a private sphere in the midst of the busy world, city, traffic, that the car ads are trying to sell us. The car is a product and a status object that we consume in order to reconstruct ourselves within a certain lifestyle, not just to meet a set of fairly stable needs. It is simultaneously a functional and an aesthetic object – developed to be driven, seen, touched. The car is an extension of our body, an armour that gives us superhuman strength, makes us strong, heavy, untouchable. Is there an inherent dilemma in having access to the acceleration that the car represents, which is so far beyond our own human speed, becoming speed?

With the exhibition Out of Pocket, Kristine Tillge Lund presents captivating and abstract ceramic objects that examine the car as a design object and a fetish. With analytical curiosity, the car has been disassembled, chopped up and divided into separate components. Four doors, cast into the shape of car doors from different 1990s cars, a shelf unit and two containers are presented as disconnected, isolated objects in the room. The car is a thoroughly designed object, but its design is intended to be inconspicuous. It is only when it is removed from its customary context that the design itself stands out – not least the design elements seen in relation to the body and as an extension of it. Through the car’s design, we can discern the proportions of the imagined driver and the social perceptions associated with the interior space of the car. Inside the car, the body is placed into a fixed position that has been determined by others. There are no other spaces where that particular design is used or makes sense.

The car is also a mode, a place and a state. An object we might desire as well as a means to achieve something we desire. Cars have an erotic quality stemming from their shapes and our own fantasies of power and speed, status and freedom. Think of Lolita’s road trip with Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s novel: it represents their feeling of freedom but also the forbidden, perverse obsession that does not allow them to stand still and which becomes a prison to them both.

But where is the car in this exhibition? The abstract and isolated shapes distributed throughout the room are disconnected, only held together by an idea. All the objects come from car interiors and are within reach from the driver’s seat. At some point, these fragments have been picked up and stamped out of the flow of time in order to become part of this collection. The displays give rise to unusual associations. The door shells have been left to dry in an oversize dish rack, and the walls have been equipped with pockets. What are the implications of the notion of washing a car in a kitchen sink? The endless fantasies about women and cars – the car as a woman, women posing on top of cars – have been turned inside out and reassembled. The new fantasy is an anachronism, or it exists outside time: here, the colour of a 1970s sportscar is combined with car doors from the 1990s and ashtrays for a smoking driver; it is liberated from the shape of the car. From this display, you can select individual components, put on the Transformer’s armour, walk into the desert and roll down the window as you observe the sky and the passing cars.

Anne Kølbæk Iversen


Kristine Tillge Lund (b. 1973, Frederiksberg). Lives in Copenhagen and is a member of a workshop collective in Frederiksberg. Tillge Lund graduated from the Royal Danish Academy – Design, Bornholm, in 2001. After some years as a practising ceramic artist, she earned an MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2008. She has worked as an independent ceramic artist ever since. Tillge Lund has taken part in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Denmark and abroad, including at Gustavsbergs Konsthall in Sweden, Mindcraft in Milan and Bagsværd Church, Copenhagen Ceramics and Toves Galleri in Copenhagen. She has been awarded grants from Danmarks Nationalbank’s Anniversary Foundation of 1968 and the Danish Arts Foundation and has received awards from, among others, Annie og Otto Johs. Detlefs fond, Ole Haslunds Kunstnerfond and Anne Marie Telmànyi født Carl-Nielsens fond til støtte for kvindelige billedkunstnere. Tillge Lund has been the initiator of several major exhibitions and was a co-founder of the exhibition venue Stereo Exchange together with visual artist Owen Armour.

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Spatial Collage

Karen Bennicke (DK)

12 January – 18 February 2023

Architecture is Karen Bennicke’s primary source of inspiration. This perspective lends her works a strong spatial character, with light and shadow as key actors in a sort of intuitive mathematical construction of thematically connected serial sculptures. She operates in a field in between something distinct and recognizable and something vaguely defined that emerges in a space with harmonious as well as chaotic aspects. With this, she attempts to suspend the distinction between the logical and tangible universe of form that we are familiar with from our daily lives and a realm that is illogical, unfamiliar and absurd.

The largest object in the exhibition, the monumental Geometrical Composition from 2019, emerged as a paraphrase of a plan by the French-Japanese architect Bernard Tschumi. Bennicke blew up a selected detail from this plan and inflated it to create a three-dimensional form. Big, heavy and brutalist, its clear layering brings a strong dynamic quality to the expression. 

Over the past couple of years, Bennicke has based her work on a building by the French architect and sculptor Georges Adilon, a special-needs school built in 1976 in La Verpillière, France. The interesting aspect of this work of architecture is the interaction between four staggered bombastic elements that form the central core and express both gravity and interference. This core is under attack from a delicate, almost insect-like asymmetrical system of stairs, an interpretation Bennicke has transferred to her own visual expression. The series, which Bennicke has titled Spatial Collage, so far includes thirteen sculptures. The exhibition at Peach Corner presents the five most recent additions, a collection of tangible spatial forms that provide access to utopian mental spaces and visions. 

Karen Bennicke (b. 1943, Denmark). Lives and works in Bregentved near the Danish town of Haslev. Trained as a potter in 1958–1961. She has had her own studio since 1961. In 1972 she established a shared studio with writer and ceramic artist Peder Rasmussen in Copenhagen, since 1974 in the town of Bregentved. Bennicke has held numerous exhibitions both in Denmark and abroad and is represented in a several museums, including Designmuseum Danmark, Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Museé des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She has received many grants and awards including the life-long honorary grant from the Danish Arts Foundation in 2016 and the Thorvald Bindesbøll Medal in 2017. 

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