Main Dishes: A Ceramic Encyclopedia

In many cultures, ceramic dishes have been seen as a narrative element, as important cultural witnesses. An encyclopedia of traditions, knowledge, and symbols. Officine saffi, ceramic arts in Milan, asked their artists to make their very own small encyclopedia, a visual synthesis of the gallery’s research. All works are available and they come directly from the artists’ studios. TLmag cherry-picked work of three of the fifteen incredible artists.

Johannes Nagel

‘’Making a dish for a show of dishes. Pondering the limits of the task. Is it for the wall – the plate being the ceramicist‘s standard vehicle to put something up in between the paintings or is it for the Table – for serving, for apples, Christmas cake and roast, the useful everyday adornment? I start with making something roundish, a flat scrape in sand, casting it in porcelain.The urge to fill it with bisque leftover bits and layers of glaze is too strong. Can‘t wait for the apples to do the job of finishing the impression. Analog to the conclusion I came up with in thinking about the conditions of making vases – I hardly ever thought of flowers – it is difficult to do the dish for apples in the context of self-expression. Leaving room for fruit on a piece of clay is a different task than making a point about the subject in a single dish. It inevitably becomes a frame for improvisation, for being talkative about my ideas on cultural sample sand material.’’

Kaja Upelj

“I create abstract, organic and tactile works of art with the manipulation of glass and metals, which change our perception of material as cold and fragile, and by oscillating light and iridescent colours, question our perception of glass, surroundings and the ideological structure of society. I believe the world we perceive fails to be reality unless we start criticizing the ideological daily fragments, through which we are subconsciously seduced to help shape the problematics of the world we currently live in.”

Loredana Longo
“A soft clay dish is crossed by numerous knives.The blades come out of the surface, becoming the meal. I have been working for years on the concept of destruction and reconstruction, applying a systematic transformation of the original object that becomes an offended or offending subject.”

ARTISTS ON SHOW: Elisa Bertaglia, Silvia Celeste Calcagno, Yewen Dong, Mia E Göransson, Anderd Herwald Ruhwald, Yasuhisa Kohyama, Loredana Longo, Shozo Michikawa, Kazuhito Nagasawa, Johannes Nagel, Irina Razumovskaya, John Shea, Zsolt József Simon, Kati Tuominen-Niittylä, Kaja Upel.