Johannes Nagel

Through an eclectic body of vessels and sculpture, German ceramicist Johannes Nagel rehearses enduring questions about form and function, control and spontaneity, rigour and improvisation. His practice sits at a restless intersection of sculpture, vessel-making, and material inquiry, one shaped by a wide arc of influences. While his objects are in dialogue with the history of ceramics, they evade answering to one single tradition within it. From Japanese tradition to Bauhaus formalism to the radicals of California, the artist resists resolving these inheritances into a settled style. Rather, Nagel keeps them in productive tension, making work that feels perpetually mid-discovery.

Central to his practice issand-casting. This technique, rarely used in ceramics, is the result of a lineof experiments that led to a very direct manual process of carving organicshapes by hand in a box of densely packed sand. The hollow is then cast with porcelain slip and unearthed after a settling period. The results carry the quality of things found rather than made: asymmetrical, seamless, strange. From this process he has developed series including Stegreif–the German word for improvisation–as well as complex open work structures cast from interconnected channels dug through the sand. Glazing and surface-working follow, with Nagel layering colour, texture, and mark-making in ways that preserve the traces of making rather than conceal them.

For Nagel, the studio is a place of genuine uncertainty. "My process is all about surprises," he has said. "Every step involves a dance with materials, and I am not always in the lead, by nature and by purpose." The kiln, like the sandbox, is a collaborator: "I love opening the kiln and seeing the results of temperature and gravity working on form and glaze."

Johannes Nagel studied ceramics at the University of Art and Design Burg Giebichenstein in Halle,Germany, where he has been based ever since. He has had three solo exhibitions with Gallery FUMI: I Hardly Ever Thought of Flowers (2015), Vessels, Perhaps 2010–2017 (2018), and FARBFELD (2022). His work is held in, among others, the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Musée Ariana, Geneva; Keramikmuseum Westerwald,Höhr-Grenzhausen; and Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne, München, D.

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