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?

Julia Paetzold

Moritz Karweick

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.

Eva Klee

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’.

Katrin Mueller-Russo

Tilmann Meyer-Faje |1