Leonard Witte

Ancient farmers sacrificing a pig to ensure the fertility of their fields — it kind of makes sense. But a huge festival where people buy piglets to throw into pits, to dig them up months later as an offer to their agricultural deities... Leonard Witte enjoys this kind of absurd evolution. He made his own version of a ceramic vessel linked to this ancient Mediterranean practice, adorned with a pig growing atop a tall, leafy stem. A second large vessel shows a sgraffito drawing of two birds fighting against a mountainous background inspired by Joachim Patinir, an early Netherlandish landscape painter. His imaginary mountains were praised by Albrecht Dürer and copied by numerous painters, elevating Patinir’s fantastic rock formations to high authority. Witte’s work is rooted in (art) history, and it shows in the pieces he made at EKWC: they have travelled through time – and now they are here