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 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.”