Contemporary Ceramics

For this edition of the Biennial, over 25 artists and designers — including Andrea Branzi, Alessandro Mendini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, as well as Alexis Georgacopoulos, Florence Doléac and Adrien Rovero — accepted exhibition curator Roberto Costantino's invitation to dream up and develop original and surprising vases. Stemming from the renowned ceramics center of Albisola, along the Ligurian coastal region, many of the pieces entail truly remarkable technical feats. The flower vase theme lends itself to a wide range of applications, and offers much leeway for expressivity in such a supposedly commonplace object. These works, as refreshingly innovative as they can be radical, attest to their creators' renewed interest in this ancient medium.

Albisola is a town with an age-old tradition of pottery, known as a small European capital of ceramics thanks to the historic hospitality and fertile cooperation offered to artists who over the course of the 20th century have made the place famous all over the world.

The title of this traveling exhibition of the 4th Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art, Changing the world with a vase of flowers, acts as a guideline and opens up many creative possibilities, emphasizing "a destiny of art and design among the small things and great transformations that can also be caused by the beating wings of a butterfly", as Roberto Costantino, artistic director of the event, writes in the catalogue. The exceptional relationship between ceramics and the art avant-gardes of the 20th century is a part of the local cultural heritage, developed today by the design and prototyping workshop of the Biennial, enhancing the territory with the immaterial assets of design, contemporary art and digital crafts, through the combination of the traditional skills of craft workshops and the most advanced techniques of high-tech production.

The internationally renowned artists and designers invited to participate have reacted in an innovative, radical way, responding to the appeal with personal, original, technically ingenious interpretations that shift and subvert the meaning of the vase. All the artists and designers involved have rethought the identity of the object and its potential artistic, conceptual and symbolic value, proposing unusual sculptural constructions that redefine and renew our relationship with its use, the very architecture of the vase and its relationship with space.

Changing the world with a vase of flowers
4th Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art
until september 25
mudac, Musée de design et d'arts appliqués contemporains
Lausanne

Curated by: Roberto Costantino
Produced by: Attese Edizioni, Savona -Italy
Partners: mudac-Museum of Contemporary Design and Crafts of Lausanne; Italian Cultural Institute of Madrid; Fondazione Pier Luigi e Natalina Remotti-City of Camogli; Fondazione De Mari-Cassa di Risparmio di Savona; Unione Industriali della Provincia di Savona; Cassa di Risparmio di Savona; Cittadellarte - Fondazione Michelangelo Pistoletto, Biella
Catalogue: Corraini Edizioni