Kira Fröse
Something happened in Kira Fröse’s EKWC studio, but what? Things started melting, their functionality impaired beyond mending. A ping-pong bat, a watering can, spoons… just the kind of ordinary items you might find in Fröse’s installations. But where she would previously amalgamate them with oozing, gushing, dripping, pouring liquids and nondescript blobs in arrested motion, she now targets the objects themselves. Certainly, there’s something hilarious about the way Fröse undermines reality – or people’s expectations – in warped pastel-hued porcelain. At the same time these distortions reflect everyday irrationalities that puzzle and sometime nearly derail her. What is the use of rules that no one abides by? In a side-project that quickly grew in relevance, she experimented with glass melting through the bottom of old enamelled pans, providing them with the most delicate but impractical feet. Who says you can’t work with glass in a ceramic work centre?
Caro Suerkemper
Caro Suerkemper often works with fragments of old figurines or dolls, but this time she moulded an entire wooden horse from a merry-go-round. After a first, more or less straightforward copy she made two more casts, which she then bent to her imagination to represent them together in free fall, moments before they hit the ground. A third work shows three horses falling backwards, their elegant legs reaching towards the sky as if to look for solid ground. Their intertwined bodies become abstract volumes, the eyes counterpoints in a complex Baroque composition that obeys the laws of equilibrium. The sculptures seem to defy gravity, but it’s a delicate balance. “Horses are prey animals,” Suerkemper says, “that’s why they have a 350° range of vision. They need to flee at the first sign of danger.”
Harry Hachmeister
Cats are the most body-positive animals imaginable, says photographer, painter and sculptor Harry Hachmeister about the flat feline creatures that populate his work. Body image connects the cats to another constant in Hachmeister’s energetic, humourful and sensitive universe: the kettlebells. Counter-balancing the corporate seriousness of the gym, the weights point to transformation and the numerous reasons people want to change their appearance, while increasingly taking on anthropomorphic traits themselves. Hachmeister, who loves the physicality of clay, was in a happy place at EKWC. He learned to make his own glazes and allowed the natural colour of the clay to surface as well. Inspired by a research trip to California that also took him to Joshua Tree, he explored new forms to express intimacy, found, oddly enough, in cactuses and rocks. In the meantime, even the dreamy cats seem to turn into painterly landscapes.
Dorothea Nold
The movement of an earth quake may linger in the body to resurface one day in a group of skeleton buildings on the verge of crumbling. Or are they dancing? For years, artist Dorothea Nold researched our physical relation to the architectural environment, but in the work she made at EKWC, the buildings become bodies themselves. Inspired by Sicily’s exuberant botany and rich architecture, several sculptures blur the line between growth and construction, with leaves sprouting from the arcs and columns that rise up to the sky. After the first building collapsed in the kiln, Nold decided to allow an element of chance and decay. As she was building new pieces, she refrained from reinforcing them even when she knew there were weak spots. After firing, all the works were deformed and leaning over, but they were still standing, as a testimony to both human vulnerability and resilience.
Sarah Pschorn
For a large solo at the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen, Sarah Pschorn (DE) decided to abandon her usual method of elaborating on thrown volumes. This time, the sculptures had to be bigger, more organic, hand-built. At EKWC she created a whole series of works related to life underwater – a childhood fantasy reflected in popular culture from Disney to Lady Gaga. Shell-covered objects and huge bright-glazed tubular sponges reaching to the ceiling constitute the ‘paradise’ theme of the exhibition Records of Gravity, which also addresses ‘balance’, heaviness’, and ‘cloudy’.
