Johannes Nagel – I Hardly Ever Thought of Flowers

The vessel is to ceramics what the human figure is to fine art: it is canon, discipline, model, benchmark; it is a known form, a reference point, against which new forms may be compared. Its proportions may be pleasing and familiar, or thought-provoking and disturbing in their dissonance. Johannes Nagel is a ceramicist who works with the vessel as a reference point for sculptural thinking. His forms play on notions of what a vessel is, and at the same time confound preconceptions – of function, of proportion, of decoration, of material. He says, “What sort of a function do vessels have today? What may they contain? I Hardly Ever Thought of Flowers…”

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