Marc Leuthold: Migration is on view at Guangdong Shiwan Ceramics Museum, Foshan
October 15, 2024 – February 26, 2025
The Guangdong Shiwan Ceramics Museum staff, Executive Director Ruan Xiaojia, and Museum Deputy Directors Li Yanjuan, Huang Ting, and Rong Yao are pleased to present Marc Leuthold’s solo exhibition. The Museum is located in the Foshan district of Guangzhou City in Guangdong Province of Mainland China. Guangdong Shiwan Ceramics Museum is a cultural highlight of the Foshan district and annually features an artist’s solo exhibition in conjunction with an international juried Ceramics Competition. The exhibition this year consists of 55 sculptures by artist Marc Leuthold.
Marc Leuthold’s “Migration” exhibit is the first solo exhibition at the Museum featuring the artwork of a foreign artist. The artwork varies greatly in scale from the tiny “Tangle” piece – 7 cm tall to the eponymous “Migration” multi-media sculpture, 10 meters wide, consisting of paintings and ceramics mounted on the main wall of the gallery. Also included in the exhibit is a video documenting the artist’s 2023 multi-media video and ceramic installation, “Unsayable,” commissioned by the Yijin Museum of Shanghai.
Accompanying the exhibition is a 78-page catalog with essays by Tsinghua Professor Dr. Baiming, by artist and lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design of Los Angeles, California Mario Cutajar, by artist and collector Robyn Horn, and by Beijing art critic Wang Jun.
In preparing the exhibition, Leuthold offered the following comments:
‘This “Migration” exhibit is the first solo exhibition in China in which I have had the opportunity to share a large number of individual works of art. Prior exhibitions have featured larger conceptual installations or singular works within a group exhibition. I have valued all of these opportunities to share artwork. In group exhibitions, I have usually exhibited circular carved fluted sculptures. These mandalas and Bi reference historical forms and the cosmos – something beyond us but of which we are a part. This solo exhibition at the Guangdong Ceramic Museum gives me an opportunity to share the fuller breadth of my creative practice.
The title of the exhibition, “Migration,” encompasses my role as a peripatetic artist. From childhood, I moved between New York and Europe, having family in both regions. Early, I became interested in Chinese ceramics through my Sinophile father. In 2012, through the patronage of Bai Ming and Ichi Tsu, I began making work in China. Migrating my practice for months at a time in 2016 and 2017 set the stage for the five-year period when I lived (2018-23) in Shanghai. Most of the work in this exhibition was made in that half-decade. Dehua porcelain has had an impact on my work: Dehua clay, when backlit, has a luminosity of almost a spiritual or celestial quality. I could not make this work in New York.
The elaborate carved wooden bases that accompany the ceramics allude to the 18th-century Baroque French practice of displaying Chinese porcelains on elaborate ormolu (gilded bronze) bases to signify their preciousness. In making porcelains in China and designing carved wooden bases, I am reversing this French practice. Some of my base designs echo the Qing Dynasty style, which – like the French Rococo style, was elaborate, asymmetrical, and emerged in the 18th century. Cooperating with Chinese artists to produce the bases adds a vital layer of cultural exchange and friendship to my migratory art-making practice. These bases also allow me to experiment with how the sculptures should be oriented.
The concept of migration is also tied to the pandemic period during which some of the artwork was created. Migrating to work in China and living among my Chinese brothers and sisters during trying times brought me closer to the Chinese practice of cooperation and collaboration, which I deeply admire. The long periods of solitude encouraged introspection and development and yielded entirely new work. “Wrinkled”, “Ge”, “Figure” and especially “S” reflect new explorations. The “S” sculpture, in particular, involved experimental processes inspired by the nature of Chinese clay.
My work is essentially abstract, so strictly speaking, it is unnamable. Hints of feminine or masculine representation echo the Nietzschean contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian contributions to the creative process. The work issues from the tension between creative and destructive drives, and I see myself as, ultimately, a conduit for the flow of the universe that has propelled me along my path.’
Marc Leuthold, a citizen of the United States and Switzerland, lives and works in China and New York. Leuthold has been invited to create and exhibit art all over the world and seeks cross-cultural experiences, collaborations and friendships. Leuthold graduated from the University of North Carolina with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1988. As an emeritus professor at the State University of New York, Leuthold is one of the only Westerners who has taught Ceramics full-time at a Chinese University, the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. Leuthold won second prize in the Blanc de Chine International Porcelain competition in 2017. Leuthold has exhibited artwork at the Museum of Modern Art, PS1, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. Recent exhibitions in Shanghai include solo exhibitions at the Yijin Art Museum and ART LABOR Gallery and installation works at the Wutong Art Museum and the China Art Museum. Leuthold has written numerous articles about ceramics – most of which have been published in New Ceramics/Neue Keramik Journal of Germany.
Leuthold’s artwork has been featured in many journals and books, including Baiming’s World Famous Ceramic Artists’ Studios and Hebei Press of Shanghai. Leuthold’s work was featured on the cover of Peter Lane’s book Contemporary Studio Porcelain, University of Pennsylvania Press. In 1999, Leuthold was elected to the International Academy of Ceramics and, in 2016, to the Swiss Ceramics Association.
Contact
18516622127@163.com
Guangdong Shiwan Ceramics Museum
233H+W22, Gaomiao Rd
Chancheng District, Foshan, Guangdong Province, 528031
China
Photos courtesy of the artist and Guangdong Shiwan Ceramics Museum
