Urban | 2020–2023
“Urban” is a group of works that delves deep into architecture and space. Part of the inspiration for this is taken from photos of Tokyo and Osaka. These two pulsating Japanese metropolises are full of resounding contrasts. Hypermodern skyscrapers with glass façades meet concrete cityscapes with multi-storey streets, shaped by urban planning to forge a unique aesthetic full of contradictions.
My interest here was in combining this ambivalent, metropolitan grammar of forms with characteristics typical of Japan and its philosophy, such as stillness, essence and radicalism, and developing them into ceramics.
Setting out from various industrial materials such as pipes, rubber, corrugated iron and ceramic tiles, I built structures that can function both as vases or bowls, or even architectural models. Cast in porcelain, they gave rise to sculptural objects whose surface could, in a further step, be given a new colour. In the vase-like form, for instance, orange was used to highlight the structural nature of the vertical relief lines, thus evoking associations with the horizontal configuration of high-rise facades. This creates an interesting dialogue, between the high-rise buildings outside the museum and the hybrid ceramic form inside, when one looks out of the window in the exhibition space.
These sculptural porcelain objects are staged in the room in a way that lets them enter into a dialogue with the likewise exhibited source materials, colourfully sprayed corrugated sheet metal and wall tiles. Individual objects even cast reflections in painted surfaces. With this, the customary proportional relationships enter a kind of limbo, so that the scale of the objects changes in our perception. Associations with metropolitan silhouettes are triggered, along with memories of the structures and colours of modern cities as well as everyday objects.
Margareta Daepp
Colonne rose, Colonne orange-bleu
Noir flottant
Scène, Construction bleu
Structure ouverte 1
Espace Ariana
Soleils levant
Further work
