Exquisite Rupture: Aneta Regel in Retrospective is on view at Jason Jacques Gallery, New York
June 2-29, 2022
Jason Jacques Gallery is thrilled to announce a retrospective exhibition covering the past decade of Aneta Regel’s work. Fresh off of the heels of her entry into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s formidable collection, this exhibition explores just what makes the London-based sculptor’s work so subversive.
Her signature use of color, form, and texture is what gives her work such visual gravitas. It’s an approach to sculpting she developed over many years, relying on her own expert understanding of slips and glazes, as well as fired porcelain’s peculiar reaction to the inclusion of foreign bodies, to hone her technique.
It’s this understanding of clay, and cultural context surrounding fine porcelain, that has allowed Regel to subvert and re-invent the idea of a ‘desirable clay object,’ allowing us to analyze porcelain’s history as a luxury good, an illustrious signifier of refinement, and sculptural medium.
While we imagine fine clay objects to be smooth and un-included, Regel fills hers with gravel, grit, and hand-ground stones— anything from volcanic rock to granite is fair game. While we imagine porcelain pottery to be painted in a fine hand and gilded in gold, Regel douses her work in dazzling, resplendent tones; as she lets her glaze drip, she conjures a luminous, technicolor geography of shapes that transcends the divide between sculpture and vessel.
Regel has mastered the art of the fissure, transforming the cracked vessel from an object of derision into an object of desire. Allowing stone to burst forth from her naturalistic, sculptural forms she tears a hole in preconception. Thus, over the course of her celebrated career, she has turned the cracked pot into a radical sculptural form that subverts fragility and vulgarity to rapturous joy.
Aneta Regel creates abstract ceramic sculptures that emulate the natural world around her. Trees, rocks, and riverbeds are some of the elements through which she seeks to convey her vision. She captures the forms, energies, and rhythms of these natural phenomena, and also provokes emotional responses in viewers. Regel explains, “The human body and objects found in nature fascinate me. My work carries anthropomorphic references and autobiographical narratives.”
In addition to clay and layers of glaze, Regel also uses volcanic rock materials, basalt, granite, and feldspars to form the main body of her pieces, resulting in visually complex surfaces and textures. Regel is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and member of the Fellow Craft Potters Association. Her work is held in the collections of the World Ceramics Museum in Korea, Westerwald Museum in Germany, and Handelsbankens Konstförening in Sweden. Her first solo exhibition in the United States, Second Nature, was organized at the Jason Jacques Gallery in 2017. Aneta Regel lives and works in London.
Contact
info@jasonjacques.com
Jason Jacques Gallery
529 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
United States
Images courtesy of Jason Jacques Gallery and Aneta Regel
