News

06.11.2017

Galerie Lefebvre & Fils PRESENTS THE EXHIBITION "LANDSCAPES" BY JAY KVAPIL

About

LEFEBVRE & FILS
24 rue du Bac
75007 Paris
 

 


Main image:
JK#1278, Large Ovoid Bowl, 2017, Ceramic, crater glaze 33 x 62,2 cm, Courtesy Jay Kvapil et Galerie Lefebvre & Fils

Image below:
JK#1079, Bowl, 2015, Ceramic, crater glaze, 14 x 15,2 cm, Courtesy Jay Kvapil et Galerie Lefebvre & Fils

 

Lefebvre & Fils is pleased to announce Landscapes, the second exhibition of work by the artist Jay Kvapil from 21 November to 9 December 2017.

'When I started making pottery again in 2004 after a long hiatus, my desire was to get to the very core of the ceramic process and the history of pottery. Glazes that melt, fuse, bubble, crawl, and drip in the heat of the kiln covering minimal pottery forms that defy gravity, with the result being a narration of that process frozen in time.

To me, the one essential ingredient of all good art - whether it is visual art, music, literature, theater, dance, or lm – is that it has tension. Without tension, it isn’t art. [...]

I’ve been asked why I make forms that are so simple and modernist. I’ve studied ceramics for so long that the forms are a distillation of all the historic pottery that has spoken to me, without being speci c to any. Because I want to create tension between the forms and the surface, either the form or the surface has to be simple, and (hint) it’s not the glazes. I hang complex, sometimes even ugly glazes on forms that I hope have a kind of simple elegance.

Most of the recent pieces allude to landscape, intentionally so. After all, I grew up in Arizona, which is a land of vast desert landscapes, but it is also rich in intimate pictorial spaces found in small rocks and stones. Some of the pieces have an obvious horizon line, giving them a distant landscape, while others depict an intimate lands- cape through which we travel – whether literally or in our minds - without a speci c reference. In the end, what I make is pottery just pottery. I’m not interested in calling it ceramic art or sculptural ceramics. It’s pottery, plain and simple, because that is the language that it speaks and the history from which it comes, and to whom it speaks. If my work is successful, I like to think that it is kind of conversation with potters that came before me, and the ones who will come after. '

Jay Kvapil

 

 

 

 


Main image:
JK#1278, Large Ovoid Bowl, 2017, Ceramic, crater glaze 33 x 62,2 cm, Courtesy Jay Kvapil et Galerie Lefebvre & Fils

Image below:
JK#1079, Bowl, 2015, Ceramic, crater glaze, 14 x 15,2 cm, Courtesy Jay Kvapil et Galerie Lefebvre & Fils

 

About

LEFEBVRE & FILS
24 rue du Bac
75007 Paris