Clay Matters

Ceramics has long occupied a marginal position within the visual arts, often relegated to the realms of craft and applied art. Yet the medium possesses an age-old tradition of both functional and artistic significance. Over the past decades, artists have rediscovered and reinvented this material, allowing ceramics to emerge today as a fully-fledged and versatile medium within contemporary art: at once ancient and current, fragile and powerful, sensual and conceptual.

The appeal of ceramics lies in the direct physical relationship between maker and material: clay is malleable, resistant, and alive, carrying within it the traces of its own making. This tactile quality is used by artists to give tangible form to themes such as identity, nature, spirituality, and politics, and reflects a broader shift within the art world in which attention to material, process, and sustainability has become central.

Clay Matters approaches ceramics as a living, thinking material and brings together artists who each engage with the medium in their own way: from poetic, mythical, and organic approaches to conceptual and sculptural experiments. Alongside artists closely associated with the gallery, such as Luca Monterastelli, Valgerður Sigurðardóttir, Clara Spilliaert, Koen Theys, and Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, guest artists include Justine Grillet, Cameron Jamie, Pei-Hsuan Wang, and Johan Creten. Creten is regarded as a pioneer who secured ceramics a prominent place within contemporary visual art, and thus forms an important reference point within this project.

The exhibition is not conceived as an overview of individual practices but as a spatial dialogue in which works question and contextualize one another. Between the contributions, a field of resonances emerges in which ceramics moves between extremes: between tactility and idea, between the intimate gesture and public meaning, without resolving these oppositions.

Clay Matters brings together intersecting approaches. There is a strong presence of the narrative and the animated: figurative and organic forms that refer to myth, body, and ritual, evoking a world in which human, animal, and hybrid entities merge. In the work of, among others, Van Caeckenbergh, Grillet, Jamie, Spilliaert, and Sigurðardóttir, clay functions as a memory of gestures and stories, in which archetypal references and personal mythologies converge.

At the same time, this materiality is deployed in a more conceptual and critical way. Artists such as Theys, Monterastelli, and Wang use the medium to question systems of representation, identity, power, and context, with sculptures functioning as carriers of ideas: restructuring space, disturbing perception, and challenging the conventional role of the object.

Johan Creten moves effortlessly between these positions. He underscores how porous these approaches are and demonstrates how the sensual and the conceptual do not exclude one another but instead reinforce each other. What Clay Matters makes clear is that ceramics is never a singular medium. It is matter and bearer of meaning, craft and concept, body and idea. The exhibition shows how clay not only forms, but also disrupts, interprets, and generates ideas. In the interplay between hand and material, between physical presence and conceptual resonance, a space emerges in which ceramics reveals itself as a dynamic and critical medium: one that does not ask to be understood through a single logic, but invites experimentation, imagination, and dialogue.

By bringing together diverse approaches, Clay Matters makes visible how rich and versatile ceramics can be. The medium reflects cultural histories and renders contemporary questions tangible, while continuously responding, challenging, and transforming. At a time when images increasingly circulate detached from their physical carrier, clay also recalls another temporality: slow, resistant, and unpredictable.

Johan Creten (°1963, Sint-Truiden, Belgium) presents in Clay Matters a selection of works around C’est dans ma nature, a key project in which his innovative approach to ceramics and his socially critical engagement converge. The presentation includes a photographic collage referring to the original performance, one of ten mobile metal structures with ceramic wall elements in Sèvres stoneware, and a gilded bronze version of the work. By combining bas-reliefs in clay with movable structures of brick-like panels, Creten transforms the wall from a static architectural element into a mobile and symbolic object. The expressive, almost naturalistic reliefs function as metaphors for identity, territoriality, and interculturality, themes central to his oeuvre. The works on view also demonstrate the radicality with which Creten uses ceramics as a sculptural medium that is both poetic and politically charged. In the photographic collage The Gate, Creten likewise expresses his social engagement, making mechanisms of exclusion and intolerance visible through subtle but powerful interventions in public space.

Justine Grillet (°1998, Antwerp, Belgium) develops a practice at the intersection of sculpture, performance, sound, and ritual, in which the preparation and sharing of food becomes a fundamental form of connection and transformation. For Grillet, the everyday act of cooking and eating contains a form of contemporary “witchcraft”: an animated practice in which care, poetry, and embodied experience converge. Her work is grounded in a strong affinity with craft and material, rooted in her sculptural training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, but evolved during a residency in Iceland toward a more performative and ritual approach in which voice and body also became sculptural elements. In Clay Matters, this vision appears in works that approach ceramics as a living, sensory medium connected to action, presence, and community. Between object, ritual, and theatre, Grillet creates a universe in which wonder and collective experience are central.

Cameron Jamie (°1969, Los Angeles, United States) has developed a multifaceted practice since the 1990s at the intersection of drawing, sculpture, performance, film, and music, exploring the mythological and ritual structures of popular and folk cultures. This exhibition focuses on his ceramic practice, presenting a recent sculpture and two wall works. Jamie, who was trained in ceramics early in his education, approaches clay as an extension of his graphic and sculptural language. His organically modeled forms, built through successive additions, firing processes, and glazes, move between the figurative and the formless, the anthropomorphic and the animal. The works display rich surfaces of lava-like colors and ethereal markings derived from his automatic drawing practice. Between totem, landscape, and inner projection, these ceramic works demonstrate how Jamie merges conventional and experimental approaches, expanding the discourse on ceramics.

Luca Monterastelli (°1983, Forlimpopoli, Italy) presents three terracotta reliefs in Clay Matters that continue his investigation of bas-relief as a “political technology of the body,” a line of research developed in projects such as La Tempesta. In these new works, he departs from the historical charge of monumental relief—an imagery used in rationalist and fascist architecture to order and control collective bodies—but subverts that logic from within. The compositions still carry the monumentality of classical relief but refuse to resolve into a readable or coherent whole; the monument fails in its own authority. Where earlier works showed external intervention, disruption now emerges from the material itself: the clay cracks and deforms during release from the 3D-printed negative, so that the “injury” of the image is not added but produced by the process. The reliefs thus become not carriers of power, but of rupture and resistance, where the body is both subject and breaking point of representation.

Clay Matters

27 June - 29 August 2026