Why “Ugly” Ceramics Are So Interesting

“Individuals need to contact it,” Thomas Kelly, director at Sean Kelly Gallery in Los Angeles, advised Artsy, describing Brian Rochefort’s Falcon (2025)—certainly one of three sculptures prominently featured within the gallery’s sales space at Frieze Los Angeles in February. This visceral ceramic work is a riot of erupting textures and cracked glazes in lavender, teal, and rust, calling to thoughts an alien terrain. It’s typical of Rochefort’s follow, which encompasses sculptures and vessels that Kelly stated really feel “like they’re residing, respiratory.”.

Rochefort’s work displays a wider aesthetic pattern: deformed and unpolished ceramics that ooze, rupture, and enjoy dysfunction. These works, which may very well be described—admiringly or not—as “ugly,” lean intentionally into what clay vessels have traditionally averted: collapse, asymmetry, and extra. Whereas their tough edges really feel like a response to the slickness of a lot modern minimalist design, they aren’t fully novel. “Ugly” ceramics do, nevertheless, communicate to a notably of-the-moment want to subvert historical past and welcome imperfection.

The experimental underpinnings of as we speak’s “ugly” ceramics will be traced again over a century. In Mississippi within the Eighteen Nineties, George Ohr, the self-proclaimed “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” twisted and pinched his vessels into wild kinds that defied conference. By the mid-Twentieth century, Peter Voulkos was pushing the medium even additional, tearing open pottery and channeling the vitality of Summary Expressionism into slabs, gashes, and stacked kinds.

That unruly vitality is carried ahead by modern ceramicists like Kathy Butterly, recognized for her crumpled porcelain works, and Takuro Kuwata, whose revolutionary glaze strategies produce exploding kinds. Such artists are seen in each industrial and institutional settings. As an example, Kuwata was the topic of a latest solo present at Salon 94 in New York. Shozo Michikawa’s hulking, abrasive clay kinds took the form of a teapot exhibited by Loewe at this yr’s Salone del Cell in Milan, and Masaomi Yasunaga’s cracked, lumpy vessels have been on view in Lisson Gallery’s Artwork Basel Hong Kong 2025 sales space. In the meantime, “Monstrous Magnificence: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie,” on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork by August seventeenth, options Yeesookyung’s glittering, malformed assemblages, pieced collectively from damaged porcelain utilizing kintsugi (a Japanese methodology of repairing pottery with gold).

These works make a transparent counterpoint to the restraint exhibited by some modern ceramicists like Ron Nagle and Ken Worth, whose comparatively streamlined kinds have formed a marketplace for modern, colourful ceramics. As a substitute, as we speak’s “ugly” ceramics provoke discomfort—which, for a lot of collectors, is exactly the purpose. In an period of curated surfaces and algorithmic smoothness, these fractured, unstable kinds really feel extra emotionally direct.

“The grotesque speaks to the human situation; it’s extra sincere,” stated artwork advisor Rebecca Ryba. “All the pieces’s so false, and we’re residing in a world of narcissism, self-importance, filters, and bullshit, and it’s not actual. And so there’s a pull in direction of realness. The grotesque, the ugly, and the deformed are fairly lovely, and a few of my shoppers see that, too.”

“Be taught the foundations like a professional, so you may break them like an artist.” That oft-cited aphorism, attributed to Pablo Picasso, captures the spirit of many modern ceramists who’re educated in classical strategies however deliberately deviate from them. The selection to make work that slumps and ruptures is usually about shifting the phrases of magnificence itself.

Beliefs of simplicity, precision, and flawlessness in ceramics are rooted in centuries of East Asian traditions, together with the elegant stoneware of the Music dynasty in China and the technically superior celadon ceramics of Korea’s Goryeo dynasty. These traditions have influenced the minimalist aesthetic fashionable in ceramics as we speak. However many artists select to push in the other way. As an example, Korean American artist Steven Younger Lee, who’s educated in conventional porcelain strategies, creates works that seem to blow up or sag mid-firing. “Deliberately deconstructing vessels recalibrates notions of classical perfection and wonder and seeks to critique concepts of failure and expectation, craft talent, and the innate worth of an object,” he stated in an artist assertion.

On the Met, “Monstrous Magnificence: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie” traces how 18th-century Europe’s obsession with imported Chinese language porcelain—and its imitation by chinoiserie—formed enduring fantasies about femininity and race. Porcelain’s fragility turned a metaphor for ladies: prized, ornamental, and simply damaged. In response, modern Asian and Asian American girls, together with Yeesookyung, reclaim the medium to recast porcelain’s loaded historical past by a feminist lens. In her “translated vases,” the Korean artist fuses damaged shards of porcelain into bulbous, gold-laced sculptures that reject the dainty perfection as soon as fetishized by the West, as a substitute embracing rupture and recomposition as types of energy and wonder.

Different artists are motivated by a want to convey historic traditions into dialog with modern motifs and concepts. That impulse is current within the work of German artist Sarah Pschorn. Her vessels are impressed by the opulence of Baroque design, notably porcelain produced by Meissen—a producer established in Germany in 1710, recognized for decorative designs influenced by East Asian ceramics. Pschorn’s “Copy and Paste” collection channels this historic predecessor, however makes use of deformed surfaces, discovered objects, and know-how like 3D printing to replace the kinds whereas referencing modern themes like digital tradition and wellness.“There may be the artist’s want for inventive freedom—to push the bounds of the fabric and problem conventional kinds,” stated Laetitia Gorsy, the Leipzig, Germany-based gallerist who represents Pschorn.

Whereas a lot of this “ugly” work could seem clumsily constructed, these artists’ aesthetic decisions shouldn’t be interpreted as an absence of technical sophistication. Beneath the sensory overload of Brian Rochefort’s work, for instance, is a rigorous understanding of the fabric. “It’s freedom within the type,” stated Kelly. “His use of coloration, his understanding of various strategies, the best way he incorporates items which may fall off within the firing course of and places them again into the sculpture.…We have been extremely drawn to the work and noticed the place it may go.”

In an period outlined by mass manufacturing and high-tech precision, handmade ceramics supply one thing more and more uncommon: proof of the maker’s contact. Cracks, fingerprints, and uneven glaze—qualities some may take into account flaws—are actually seen as markers of authenticity.

German artist Johannes Nagel works solely with porcelain, one of the unforgiving ceramic supplies. His course of is each methodical and unruly: He creates molds out of compacted sand, which he fills with liquid clay to solid his vessels. This course of is extremely irregular, typically producing huge holes and breakages within the closing merchandise. Some works, corresponding to White Twist (2018), seem weather-beaten, with unpolished surfaces pocked with holes and fingerprints. “Typically, these items accumulate character and a magnificence that grows from the battle slightly than speedy serendipity,” Nagel advised Artsy. “My intention just isn’t the perfection of the last word expression; it’s to articulate an idea of the evolution of issues.” For collectors, he added, that seen battle turns into a metaphor for all times.

This resistance to replication lies on the coronary heart of many artists’ motivations. “Grotesque ceramics, particularly, can’t be replicated by molds. It’s the artist’s hand that speaks to us instantly,” Gorsy advised Artsy. She views ceramics made on this model as a strong counterpoint to “modern points, notably AI, automation, and digitalization.”

For Japanese artist Shozo Michikawa, this ethos marks a direct departure from his personal skilled historical past. After years of working in a ceramic manufacturing unit, he deserted industrial manufacturing to develop a way of twisting dense clay on a wheel, creating kinds resembling burnt wooden, cracked stone, or geological fault traces. ​​Michikawa’s follow displays his reverence for nature and its dominance over people, a viewpoint at odds with the very nature of business.

“Perfection of type and execution just isn’t one thing that’s tantamount to success, essentially,” stated Juliet Burrows, co-founder of New York gallery Hostler Burrows, which continuously works with Michikawa. “One thing that exhibits that somebody was struggling or was imparting one thing about their day by day ritual, their day by day ideas and concepts—you may really feel that within the clay.”

For Hollywood producer and artwork collector Michael Sherman, the enchantment of Rochefort’s work was speedy. “It regarded like a colourful volcano, an eruption of clay,” he stated, telling Artsy that after encountering the work for the primary time at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, he felt magnetized by it. “I don’t essentially suppose a ceramic must be as good as a portray when it’s completed,” he added. “That’s the great thing about it—this magnanimous overflow.”

He’s not alone. As collectors search out items that really feel extra tactile and expressive, “ugly” ceramics are discovering audiences, inspired by gallerists and artwork advisors. “A group turns into extra attention-grabbing when you add extra dimensions to it,” stated Geer Pouls, founding father of the craft-forward German gallery Brutto Gusto. “In my advising work, I attempt to persuade my shoppers to problem their assortment to make it extra vivid and to convey some stress to it: in kinds, in dimensions, in materials, in contents, and so forth, in order that the works can talk with one another.”