Viewing Room

Peter Regli: New Ceramics

April 17–May 1, 2020
#PeterRegliCeramics

I put twenty or thirty lemons in a bowl and then it becomes a sculpture. You look at it, and then you start using it—it’s a living thing, a livable sculpture that changes all the time.
—Peter Regli

Generous in size and glazed with vivid hues, Swiss artist Peter Regli’s twelve new stoneware bowls transform functional vessels into sculpture. Known for his ambitious multi-media conceptual practice, the artist began making them over the past year, to serve as bases for large arrangements of fruits and vegetables in his home. Regli intends his new ceramic works to present food in ways that beguile the eye and mind, constantly changing as their contents are rearranged, consumed, and replenished.

Regli’s New Ceramics is part of Reality Hacking, an ongoing series of sculptures and public interventions that the artist initiated in the 1990s. While the works in Reality Hacking vary widely, ranging from monumental installations of marble snowmen to small items of jewelry, they are united by a distinctive uncanniness. A recurring motif of the series is the effect of shapeshifting, manifested in such ephemeral subjects such as ghosts and melting snowmen that are rendered in permanent materials such as marble, bronze and clay. Regli continues to develop his concerns with metamorphosis through the pieces in Lévy Gorvy’s online exhibition, conceiving them as sites for ever-changing displays.

Regli first started working with clay while living next door to a tile-maker in Florida. Clay appeals to him for its immediacy and malleability, as well as for the manner in which it transforms unpredictably in the kiln. While revering the material for its earthy simplicity and long history, Regli approaches the medium with an impulse to bring something new into the world. This spirit is captured in a recent statement by the artist: “For me, the material tells me to just go in some direction,” he notes. “It’s like an adventure.”

#FirstRespondersFirst

A portion of the proceeds from the sales of Regli’s works will be donated to #FirstRespondersFirst, an initiative of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Thrive Global, and the CAA Foundation, that helps provide essential protective equipment, accommodations, child care, food, mental health support, and other resources to first responder healthcare workers as they serve on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. For more information, click here.