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The Mona Bismarck Foundation is pleased to welcome the exhibition « Made in France, by Americans », conceived and created by the Fondation d’entreprise Bernardaud. On show since June 19th 2009 in Limoges, the headquarters of the Foundation, the exhibition will be presented in Paris from February 17th to April 17th 2010.

 

 

In the 1990s, the arrival of a handful of North American ceramic sculptors caused a major upheaval on the French ceramic art scene. Many trained in North America before deciding to continue their education in Europe and eventually settling in France to live and work, allowing them an independence of expression. Extremely open-minded, these iconoclasts are shaking things up in French ceramics, a domain still too heavily influenced by the weight of local faience, stoneware and porcelain traditions, and which has suffered from an excessive fascination with the Orient since the ‘60s.

 

In France, ceramics continues to be relegated to the status of «craft» rather than «art»,
which has dissuaded many artists from using clay as a medium for experimental sculpture.
The situation in the United States is very different: the gap between art and the applied
arts is not as wide as in Europe, and the educational system is multi-disciplinary in nature.
Collectors are more open-minded and the combination of artistic practices is the general rule in a market supported primarily by private enterprise. Their personal knowledge or experience of this state of affairs has no doubt greatly encouraged these eight North American sculptors, invited to exhibit their work, to shed many of their inhibitions.

 

Jonathan Hammer is the only artist whose presented works were made at the Bernardaud Foundation. Originally hailing from Chicago, he now lives in Barcelona, Spain. In 2007, he was invited by the Bernardaud Foundation to work on a very personal project: seven large porcelain sculptures representing outsized roly-poly clown toys (120 cm high). Surprising in more ways than one, these monumental porcelain “toys” presented quite a challenge to the Bernardaud craftsmen. These «functional» sculptures– when pushed, they rock back and forth – provide a perfect vehicle with which to showcase the resistance, sturdiness and gleaming whiteness of glazed porcelain, and its ability to reflect light.

 

Daphne Corregan, Wayne Fischer, Jeffrey Haines, Jonathan Hammer, Patrick Loughran, Kristin McKirdy, Luisa Maisel, Wade Saunders.

 

These eight «agitators» are stirring things up in French ceramics. As bi-cultural artists they were able to steer clear of the post-Modernism that dominated the French scene in the 1980s. This latter trend was copied from Italian design, but in a diluted form that was devoid of any real extravagance. Instead, they drew on their personal experience, their travels and their interest in other art forms to create works grounded in sincerity – which explains why their work is somewhat isolated from the mainstream. Whether their style is rigorous or relaxed, whether they lean towards abstract or narrative figural work, all of these artists are experimenting and looking constantly for new inspiration to keep in step with the changing world. Infusing their work with color, humor and sensuality, after Limoges these North Americans in France are going to keep things funky at the Mona Bismarck Foundation!

 

Frédéric Bodet

Exhibition curator

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Jonathan Hammer (b. 1960), lives in Barcelona, Spain

 

 

Jonathan Hammer, a native of Chicago, is a successful contemporary artist. Many prominent museums in the United States own examples of his work, including MoMA and the Whitney Museum in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. Famous art galleries in Spain and the United States represent his work. It took two years (2007-2009) for the Bernardaud Foundation to produce his Button Ass installation because the technical design was so complex. These monumental pieces of porcelain containing metal weights rock back and forth until they return to their center of gravity.

“For many years I have been working with the image of toys which are characterized both in their idea and in their form/function by extremes and opposites.  Victim/victimizer; master/slave; powerful/powerless.  Why toys?  Because they are things which at the same time we “love” and things which we often “torture” and abuse.  In many ways they are a mirror of the role of an artist in society.  The artist is the one most free, but also the one upon whom the others project their ideas of freedom, which is a kind of prison, as well.  So the artist in this sense can be seen as a kind of toy. (…)
In order for me to explore this image more closely, I have drawn and photographed for a long time objects which can move back and forth.  For example a rocking horse…  And with this porcelain sculpture the kind of roly-poly toy which you can push but which can never fall down. (…)
The name of Button Ass follows a Duchampian methodology.  In France, this toy, which in English is often known as a “roly poly”, is called a “culbuto”.  In fact, the etymology of the verb “culbuter” is of a military meaning exactly akin to our English word “overthrow”. And the toy of course is constantly being overthrown.  The military context is clear, however the etymology is also quite specific in literally meaning to throw one over “ass over heels” with a strong indication of sexual dominance.

 

Excerpts from a text by Jonathan Hammer

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Daphne Corregan (b. 1954), lives in Monaco and in Draguignan, (Var)

 

 

Daphne Corregan grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She became interested in art at a very young age and at 15 knew she wanted to become an artist. At age 16 she moved from the United States to southern France where she studied fine arts in Aix-en-Provence, training under Jean Biagini; afterwards she returned to the U.S. to work with Jim Romberg in Sun Valley, Idaho. She has been teaching sculpture at the school for visual arts in Monaco (Ecole supérieure d’arts plastique, école de scénographie) since 1989.

Her encounter with color, folk pottery, ethnic jewelry and textiles, first during her travels to Mexico and New Mexico and more recently to Africa (e.g. Burkina Faso, Mali, Benin, Egypt, the Maghreb….) influences and affirms her art. Her creative process begins by sketching. She prefers not to define the drawing process too rigidly so that she can keep a free hand with her interpretation before selecting a particular design. She follows up with a short series of variations on the theme, often working with the idea of a shape enclosing a void (e.g. skulls, rings or inflated organic shapes) that appear to be "wrapped" in a decorative scheme.

Permeated with the memory of use-linked designs and often playing up a deliberate repetition of shapes and motifs, Daphne Corregan's work falls into the category of "decorative arts" in the most favorable meaning of the word.  As a ceramic artist, she is especially interested in the invasive power of motifs, whether they be industrial – such as patchwork textiles, frieze borders, stencils and wallpaper - or more traditionally associated with ceramic culture (e.g. her recent sculptures Bellies and Breathing are decorated with peonies reminiscent of Chinese porcelain). The graphic design is always central, but in cut-out fragments alternated with calm zones blackened by reduction, sometimes engraved with scarified patterns or pierced with holes.

 

 

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Wayne Fischer (b. 1953), lives in Revest-les-Eaux, (Var)

 

 

Raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Wayne Fischer studied art, physics and astronomy from 1972 to 1978. He finally channeled his passion for fossils and the origins of life into art when he decided to work as a sculptor in porcelain, his chosen material.

 

He sought to express the essence of life in themes that he first developed in the 1980s which would become recurrent motifs in his work (e.g. reassuring germination versus obscure disturbances, the world of Nature versus things alien).  In 1986, he left Boston to move to Paris. Since 1992, he has been living and working near Toulon in southern France.

 

 

 

Porcelain, with its fluidity and plasticity, is a material that lends itself perfectly to Wayne Fischer's recurrent themes. Slabs are molded over soft shapes then assembled into three-dimensional forms matched back to front like a sewing pattern. The inner openings are thrown separately then joined to form double walls in an admirable demonstration of technique. The surface is then sprayed with a matte glaze (grey, blue or violet) that emphasizes hollows and projections.

 

 

After firing, a painstaking process of sand blasting and sanding gives the porcelain an iridescent surface finish that is at once matte and translucent. Each piece resembles a precious fossil, but also can be taken to suggest human skin with its soft contours, nerve endings, swellings and cracks, with muscle and bone lying underneath. These esthetic choices dovetail with the taste for fantasy and anticipation that has emerged in art and design today, i.e. in the viscous yet compact shapes by Matthew Barney, in Orlan's fascination with things medical and bodily transformations or Marc Newson's designs, now more organic than ever.

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Jeffrey Haines (b. 1962), lives in Nice, (Alpes-Maritimes)

 

 

Originally from Miami, Florida, Jeffrey Haines studied literature and art at Eastern Kentucky University, and the University of Tennessee (1992). Then he headed for Amsterdam, where he took postgraduate courses at the Sandberg Institute, the graduate program of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, receiving his masters in 1997. He began his career in the Netherlands, exhibiting regularly at the Galerie De Witte Voet, which specializes in experimental contemporary ceramic art. He served as technical assistant for several artists at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC) in the town of ‘S-Hertogenbosch for two years (2000-2001); EKWC invites international artists interested in carrying out a ceramics project to become temporary artists in residence. In France, he is represented by the Galerie Hehenbeck in Nice, and Paris. Since 2003, he, like Daphne Corregan, has been teaching at the Ecole supérieure d’arts plastiques in Monaco.

The recent sculptures by Jeffrey Haines are "hand pieces" that viewers are supposed to touch. The artist, who is influenced by the ergonomics of defensive weapons (such as brass knuckles), evokes the boudoir and the world of fantasy surrounding sex toys. Full of dark humor and gleeful morbidity, it's hard to tell whether they attract or repel us: they connect us with our own fears or desires and challenge what we allow ourselves to experience, depending on our personal conception of pleasure and pain. The latter varies widely, according to the taboos and preconceived ideas that shaped our upbringing. In his artwork, Jeffrey Haines skillfully takes us to the most secret depths of the unconscious.

 

 

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Patrick Loughran (b. 1948), lives in Paris (Ile-de-France)

 

 

After growing up in Detroit, Patrick Loughran studied political science, then sculpture and the applied arts at Columbia University in New York City. He taught ceramics at various universities in New York and New Mexico, and showed his work regularly in the United States, especially his whimsically decorated dinnerware. In 1992, he moved to Paris and has been teaching since 1999 at the School of Fine Arts in Limoges (ENSA).

Since the late 1990s, Patrick Loughran has frequently exhibited in France. His glazed terra-cotta works come as a revelation to an audience unaccustomed to the irreverent liberties that he takes, to the fundamental strangeness of his art or to its organic, burlesque style. The esthetics of his sculpture has much in common with a movement in North American ceramics led by Michael Lucero, Betty Woodman, Arnold Zimmerman and Adrian Saxe. But Loughran's style is looser and not quite as precious as his transatlantic counterparts.

Considering that ceramics are anchored in the art of pottery, Patrick Loughran thinks that there is a correlation between handling clay and the free use of design and color. In both cases, the hand moves on impulse, rather like the Surrealist technique of automatic writing. For example, Patrick Loughran pours glazes like a chef pouring a caramel coulis on spheres made of different clays (like juggler’s balls or profiteroles), in order to see the color changes after firing. He is more interested in deconstructing shapes than in constructing them, as if striving to reach a critical point at which the shape is too heavy, on the verge of collapse. Some of his sculptures, like his big blue Iceberg, stand like rickety scaffolding, vaguely inspired by the human skeleton or the branch of a tree which would be reassembled – or put at risk, depending on one's point of view –with the fragments of a thick terra-cotta skin. 

 

 

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Kristin McKirdy (b. 1958), lives near Fontainebleau (Seine et Marne)
Has received in October 2009 the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for “l’Intelligence de la Main”.

 

 

Kristin McKirdy, an American national born in Canada, first arrived in France when very young. She earned an undergraduate degree in Art History and Archaeology, then a Master’s in the history of modern ceramics at the Sorbonne in Paris. Starting at 15, she got her ceramics training in the 1980s as a student or a fellow in residence at various art schools in the United States and Canada. In 1990, she graduated from the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA) with a Master of Fine Arts, where her faculty advisor was Adrian Saxe, a well-known American ceramic artist.

 

After working as a designer and art consultant to the ceramics industry in Reykjavik (Iceland), she taught at various schools in California and Iceland, and at the Parsons School of Design in Paris (from 1993 to the present). She now teaches at the School of Fine Arts in Limoges (ENSA).

 

 

 

 

 

Respectful of tradition yet very open to diverse influences, Kristin McKirdy was first influenced by the precepts of English potter and theorist Bernard Leach. She also feels an affinity with the work done by iconic studio potters Hans Coper and Lucie Rie in England. Inspired by the rigorous style of Scandinavian potters from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, what she likes about North American ceramics today is the controlled abstract approach and formal precision of ceramic sculptors like Ron Nagle or Kenneth Price.
Her personal repertoire is firmly rooted in millennia-old ceramic themes: the vase, cup and amphora; the relationship between interior and exterior; the womb, fruit and seed. Her compact creations, characterized by purity of design and abstract vision, feature voluptuous curves and sensuous references, yet close in upon themselves to establish distance with everyday objects. Her most recent creations, Icebergs, are conceived to express a tension, a fracture or a change in state – making the transition from a rough surface to a smooth one, from a compact block to two separate elements – in a dialectic emblematic of her entire body of work.

 

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Luisa Maisel (b. 1959), lives in Toulouse, (Haute-Garonne)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After attending the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Luisa Maisel arrived in France in 1988 and began a career working for different graphic design agencies while teaching at the Parsons School of Design in Paris, until 1993. About fifteen years ago, she decided to devote herself to creating ceramic art and moved to Toulouse, where she produces large-scale sculptures made of glazed terra-cotta that are very different from the constructive practices and themes prevalent in the French ceramics community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In her representation of very colorful objects and figures, Luisa Maisel enters into aesthetic communion with the world around her and empathy with human pain like that caused by exile or separation with loved ones. Borrowing equally from Pop Art, Surrealism, souvenir kitsch and great classics, her pieces often have political underpinnings and evoke burning issues of the day or topical concerns. For instance, her Where are all the young girls gone? and Where are all the young boys gone? were directly inspired by the tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In some of her works, such as My America and My France, Luisa Maisel works with themes reflecting her personal mythology, i.e. her childhood memories. She proceeds by distilling substance and accumulating objects, as if working her way through the strata of memories in the brain. One of her favorite subjects is the passage of time and nostalgia for things that no longer exist. The artist captures the relentless march of time by shaping, molding or stamping talisman-like objects that are like souvenirs from different stages of her life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Wade Saunders (b. 1949) lives in Paris (Ile-de-France)

 

 

Born in Berkeley, California, Wade Saunders studied art at the University of California, San Diego. His work has been exhibited in the United States since 1975 and his sculptures are found in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum, as well as in the private collection of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Since 1990, he lives and works in Paris. In 1978, he began writing reviews as an art critic for the magazine Art in America. He teaches at the Parsons Paris School of Art and Design, and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques. In 2006, he carried out a major public commission for the marketplace of the town of Amilly, France.

 

 Wade Saunders is a "traveling artist" who likes to design his artworks in relation to where he’s working. Each of his sculptures is like a traveler's journal, produced with great competence in plastic terms using heterogeneous materials such as wood, granite, plastic, bronze, terra-cotta, textiles and elements from the plant world, and techniques compatible with the culture of the country that he is visiting. Sometimes, the artist relies on the craftsmanship of local artisans, as he did in India. He succeeds in producing deliberately simple, relatively undemonstrative forms that communicate ambivalent sensations to the viewer: one gets the impression of movements (including torsional movements), disruptions of symmetry and fragile balances, and the concentration or scattering of masses (e.g. the industrial tile corners that make up his sculpture A Room of One’s Own).

 

 

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MONA BISMARCK FOUNDATION

Created during the 1980s by the late American philanthropist Countess Mona Bismarck, the Mona Bismarck Foundation promotes artistic, literary, scientific and educational activities, particularly those which further Franco-American friendship. An American foundation, registered in the State of New York, the Mona Bismarck Foundation supports, as its main programmatic activity, a Paris Cultural Center in the Countess’ former townhouse which faces the Eiffel Tower across the river Seine.

The foundation offers an eclectic program of exhibitions and seminars, traditionally free to the public, either focusing on Franco-American cultural exchange or reflecting the late Countess Mona Bismarck’s tastes and interests. The Paris Cultural Center also houses a library dedicated to the study of American history and culture
and provides office and conference space for a select number of non-profit Franco-American associations.
This combination of activities has made the Mona Bismarck Foundation a centerpiece of cultural and scholarly exchange between France and America.

Mona Bismarck

A devotee of culture and the arts, passionate about horticulture and botanical studies, Countess Mona Bismarck was also a public spirited person who made numerous charitable gifts through her foundation. In order to lend permanency to her philanthropic activities, she generously transferred her magnificent Parisian townhouse to the foundation’s Cultural Center. Countess Bismarck’s mansion overlooking the Seine, her substantial private fortune, and her noble title may seem removed from her American origins. She was born Mona Strader and grew up, very much in the tradition of a Southern Gentlewomen, on a horse farm in the Bluegrass Region in Kentucky. In the 1920s, she married American industrialist Harrison Williams. In that golden decade and during the 1930s she was considered one of the world’s most beautiful, elegant women. Her quintessential style was celebrated in a song by Cole Porter, while her physical beauty and elegance captivated painters like Salvador Dali, Leonor Fini, Bernard Boutet de Monvel and photographers Cecil Beaton, Edward Steichen, and Horst. Mona Bismarck’s entourage included statesmen and politicians (Presidents Roosevelt and Eisenhower), royalty (the Duke of Windsor and Princess Grace of Monaco), and an impressive number of writers and artists (Greta Garbo, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Tennessee Williams, Paul Newman, Truman Capote, Erich Maria Remarque, and Hubert de Givenchy). After the death of Harrison Williams, she married Count Edward Bismarck, grandnephew of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

The vast amount of correspondence now on file at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, underlines the personal qualities of this extraordinary woman. Her letters and papers show a keen intellect: she had great curiosity in philosophical, historical, and artistic matters. Most of all, however, they evidence the exceptional warmth, generosity, and civic mindedness for which she is remembered to this day.

 

Mona Bismarck passed away in Paris on 10th July 1983.

 

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THE BERNARDAUD FOUNDATION

 

Reinventing porcelain – this is the idea which in 2003 inspired Michel Bernardaud to establish the Bernardaud Foundation, with the aim of discovering for this amazing, underestimated material, with all its unsuspected qualities and properties, horizons beyond that of pure tableware. By this initiative, the head of the company was expressing his keenness for artists and designers to come and explore the richness of porcelain, and reveal to the public eye the spirit and the power of a company which, since 1863, has centered its philosophy around three values – expertise, innovation and creativity.

Which explains why, each year, artists and designers of various nationalities and from a variety of backgrounds come to work in Limoges, in the historic workshops of the Bernardaud porcelain factory. Their talents and freedom of expression, supported and accompanied by Bernardaud's craftsmen, are giving birth to objects that, each in their own fashion, reveal unexpected outward forms and original uses of porcelain. Exactly the same can be said of the items displayed at the annual exhibitions put together by Hélène Huret, director of the Bernardaud Foundation. They help to enrich a tour which, as it leads visitors through the workshops themselves, explains the various stages of porcelain manufacture, demonstrating at the same time that this ‘white gold’ has far from finished shaping our intimate and collective universe.

EXHIBITIONS ORGANIZED BY THE BERNARDAUD FOUNDATION
2003 - Le Céladon, céramiques d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, bringing together ancient and contemporary pieces created using a technique first developed in China over 3,500 years ago.
2004 - L’Obsession du détail, a tribute to six radically different European creators with one thing in common: they all pay great attention to the expression of detail.
2005 – Terra Terre, presenting figurative Brazilian folk art made of ceramics from the Casa do Pontal Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
2006 - White Spirit, spectacular white ceramic works by young European creators inspired by the human body.
2007 – Double Vue, photographs of the manufacture workshops taken by Jean-Christophe Ballot along with 14 projects by ECAL (University of Art and Design in Lausanne) students.
2008 - Petits bouleversements au centre de la table, an exploration of the centerpiece and the ritual that accompanies it. The focus is on our relationship with food and the art of living in style. 
This exhibition travelled from Limoges to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris (November 2008 to January 2009).

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PRACTICAL INFORMATION

• Where
Mona Bismarck Foundation – 34, avenue de New-York – 75116 Paris – 01 47 23 38 88

• When
From February 17th to April 17th 2010
Tuesday to Saturday, from 10.30am to 6.30pm
Closed on public holidays.

Free entrance