Lucia Pizzani picture/ Cecilia Brunson Projects.
Santiago De la Puente/ Cecilia Brunson Projects
An frustrating number of artists and galleries camedown on London from all corners of the world for Frieze Week, and with so lotsof art fairs and satellite occasions all over the city, it was tough to browse. Yet there were some styles and patterns that actually stood out for me, and I discovered some amazing artists who are pressing the limits of ceramic art.
Seven artist-innovators breaking out of the boundaries of conventional ceramics or incorporating ceramic art in their practice that captured my eye at Frieze, Frieze Masters, Frieze Sculpture, 1-54 and Pace Gallery are; Esther Mahlangu, Frances Goodman, Genesis Belanger, Inci Eviner, Lindsey Mendick, Lucía Pizzani and Megumi Yuasa.
Originating from Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, UK, USA and Venezuela, these 6 ladies and one guy are redefining ideas of ceramic art. Elder statesman Esther Mahlangu and senior statesman Megumi Yuasa haveactually been pressing borders for years, while a moreyouthful generation consistingof Frances Goodman, Genesis Belanger, Inci Eviner, Lindsey Mendick and Lucía Pizzani are innovating at the frontier inbetween modern art, ceramic art and sculpture.
Lindsey Mendick
At Frieze London Lindsey Mendick showed brand-new anti-anti-aging serums and potions, a collection of appealing ceramic sculptures, with Carl Freedman Gallery. Motifs consistingof cigarettes, hearts, spiders and sugaryfoods embellish the vessels which function familiar images from renowned movies such as the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz. Medick provides a clearly modern, zeitgeisty-aesthetic to ceramics with her remark on modern society’s fixation with youth and rejection of the obsoleted tropes of ladies as witches.
Lindsey Mendick (b.1987) got an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, winning the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020 and rapidly making waves in the modern art world.
Lindsey Mendick states: “I’ll be showing my brand-new anti-anti-aging serums and potions! Ever because I can keepinmind, I’ve been bombarded with marketing, movies, art and literature that teach ladies about the hazards of aging. I keepinmind the Oil of Ulay adverts of the 90s; requiring me to ‘fight the 7 indications of aging’, the dazzling movie Hocus Pocus where 3 spinster witches effort to suck the lives out of little kids in a quote to stay young; and of course, The Ugly Duchess painting (also recognized as A Grotesque Old Woman) by the Flemish artist Quinten Matsys, to me, a misogynistic satire of sexuality and vanity in older age.
The witch or the hag has long existed as a monstrous version of the aging woman body… an outsider of patriarchal society, she is frequently revealed to be childless and anti-family, she is bitter and she is hazardous, she is to be prevented by those who are young and to be regulated and consistedof.”
Installation view of Lindsey Mendick ceramics at Carl Freedman Gallery, Frieze London 2024.
Carl Freedman Gallery
Lucia Pizzani
Venezuelan artist Lucia Pizzani displayed with Cecilia Brunson Projects in the Smoke area of Frieze. Pizzani’s work was justrecently obtained by the TATE Collection and Magasin3 Museum of Contemporary Art in Stockholm. Pizzani’s elegant ceramic vases and sculptures were included in Smoke, a brand-new area of Frieze London curated by Pablo José Ramírez which offered a platform for ceramic works checkingout native and diasporic histories. Ramirez curated an interesting, rejuvenating collection of global ceramic artists who are reinterpreting or examining pre-colonial customs to usage clay in broadened types. Pizzani and the other artists included in Smoke are testimony to the effect of ceramic art as one of the most amazing and visual types in modern art.
Pizzani (b. Caracas, 1975) has teamedup with El Cercado consideringthat 2013, a pottery workshop on the Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, a town where pre-Hispanic ceramic customs are still in practice. At Frieze Lonond, Pizzani provided brand-new ceramic works produced utilizing ancestral techniques throughout a summertime 2024 residency in El Cercado. Clay was drawnout from regional deposits and fired on an open bonfire kiln on the Isla de Margarita, with the increasing smoke leaving its markings on the clay, and recording the spirit of the neighborhood.
Luca Pizzani Installation at Frieze London, 2024.
Cecilia Brunson Projects.
Megumi Yuasa
At Frieze Masters an distinctive group of fragile ceramic sculptures by Brazilian Megumi Yuasa, an senior statesman of sculpture who hasactually been pressing the borders of ceramic art for 6 years, was provided by Ortuzar Projects.
Yuasa (b. 1938) in Brazil and based in São Paulo, merges Japanese and Brazilian visualappeals, products and methods, showing the history of the East Asian diaspora in Brazil.
His special sculptures intricate on conventions of Japanese ceramics by including non-traditional products such as metals, oxides and paints. While displaying often in Japanese-Brazilian circles around Brazil, the artist has likewise arranged and taught ceramics classes and workshops for lotsof years. His work and mentors reveal his individual cosmology of outright affiliation and universal source: “Everything is made from whatever, whatever depends on whatever. Everything is whatever.” His sculptures isolate components and minutes from nature, acting as distilled landscapes in which components like trees, moons and seeds communicate, whether