Anders Ruhwald

Morán Morán presents Anders Herwald Ruhwald’s first solo exhibition in Mexico City and his second with the gallery, titled This is the Living Vessel: Body. Ruhwald’s work is primarily based in ceramics, a medium he engages as both a methodology and a historical framework to process his ideas. His works traverse sculpture and utility indiscriminately, often in a contradictory and paradoxical way. The title of the show is a quote taken from The Black Mountain School poet and potter M.C. Richards’ countercultural classic, Centering, from 1964. In this book, Richards explores the poetry of humanity through the metaphor of centering – a core aspect of making pottery. Likewise, Ruhwald sees the act of making as a way of being, a way to make sense of the world.

Centrally placed in the gallery is a grouping of five works, titled Object for Three Plants (Petitot’s Dream #6-10). These amorphous red and pink forms have three protrusions that serve as vessels for plants to grow. Ruhwald considers these “living sculptures” because the foliage becomes as integral to the work as the ceramic structure itself. Evolving with time, these sculptures continually change as the plants gradually cover sections of the surface. Ruhwald relates these objects to the Danish artist Axel Salto’s (1889-1961) ceramic works which often referenced growth cycles and plant life. Through the introduction of living plants, Ruhwald takes Salto’s idea a step further, obscuring the traditional dialectical relationship between art and life, or nature and culture. With these plant works, Ruhwald seeks a variation of kinetic sculpture; one that is not mechanical but is aligned with the cycle of life as the sculpture becomes participatory through the growing and grooming of the plants.

An adjacent space contains three large sculptures and a wall work. One imposing piece, titled Yesterday’s Dream (The Future), presents an arch of intersecting arms that rise and eventually join, carrying two crystal balls. The arms are covered by a dripping, pooling blue glaze that seems to run off the piece. These two counteracting movements of rising and flowing, relay the process of becoming and decaying, simultaneously. The two glass spheres hold the entirety of the room reflected, yet turned upside down, so that the piece becomes a kaleidoscopic experience where gravity is both materialized and annulled.

Two large-scale and pale skeletal works (Holder #4 and #5) present another sort of vessel, but this time to hold candles. Ruhwald is interested in the candle’s twin properties of illumination and combustion, something he considers an everyday kind of sacrality. Flux Field (Aluminum, Barium, Calcium, Cadmium, Lithium, Natrium, Potassium, Selenium, Silicon, Zirconium) is a ceramic wall piece covered with a glaze that, as the title suggests, consists of these elements fused in the kiln into a glaze. In listing all the materials, Ruhwald lays plain the elemental nature of glaze, allowing it to contrast with the complexity of the surface.

In another section of the gallery, twelve objects from Ruhwald’s Glasur Stykke series are placed on three plinths. Glasur Stykke is a Danish term for ceramic objects where the glaze is of special significance in the artist’s production. Ruhwald has been developing this series for more than six years, and these works function as material test pieces. He thinks of glaze as both matter and color; a transformative element of the ceramic process that has the potential to fundamentally alter the perception of his work. The pieces in this exhibition are the most recent in this series, and includes the one hundredth of this ongoing investigation.

Part exploration and part manifestation, this exhibition reveals Ruhwald’s thought processes and modes of making. In ceramics discourse, vessels are often metaphorically understood as a placeholder for the body, and similarly, the glaze is considered a skin. For This is the living vessel: Body, Ruhwald allows the viewer to experience his practice as a form-giver and his use of the medium as a corollary between the body and the object.

— Morán Morán