Lola Montes Schnabel builds psychic landscapes out of clay. Working between Sicily and Milan, the New York-born artist paints directly onto terracotta, conjuring scenes that blur memory, myth, and the subconscious.
Her work draws from Surrealist automatism, Mediterranean craft traditions, and her own itinerant life across India, Indonesia, and Brazil. As an antecedent to her approach, artists such as Joan Miró and Lucio Fontana reimagined ceramic as a site of fantasy and formal experimentation—an instinctive, symbolic medium. Montes continues in this lineage, treating clay as both surface and vessel for intuitive mark-making and mythic imagery.
Her ceramic tables—populated by ambiguous figures, biblical fragments, and creatures of uncertain origin—are drawn freely, intuitively. “They come out of my head,” Montes says. “I start with the colors and then they freely flow out of me.”
The drawings are her own signature language, open to interpretation: “I like that they are ambiguous and people can see what they want in them.” For the artist, making these works often feels like an outer-body experience: “It transcends my spirit to a boundless place.”
Whether installed on a wall, set into a piece of furniture, or sculpted into a luminous object, Montes’s ceramics carry the weight of ancient artifacts—yet they feel unmistakably present, pulsing with intuition and sensual clarity.