CONVERSATION IN CLAY

Ateliers Courbet presents Conversations in Clay -- A dialogue between South African ceramicist, Katherine Glenday and multidisciplinary artist, Peter Speliopoulos, about their relationships with clay, their processes, and their inspirations.

About Katherine Glenday:

Living and working in Cape Town, South Africa, Katherine Glenday has continued to explore and hone the materiality of porcelain for over forty years. The artist has never ceased to pursue an unwavering path, exploring the material’s wide range of expressive qualities, while continuing to learn different time-honored techniques through ongoing collaboration with master ceramicists around the world. Highly informed by the visual arts — painting and drawing —, her porcelain works explore the contrasts of emphasized organic textures on soft skin-like surfaces. Each of her pieces defies the materiality of the porcelain, stretching the matter to its thinnest; their translucent skin enthralls the natural light, while their silhouettes embody the artist’s gesture as it quietly evokes movement.

Continuing a six-year-long collaboration between the New York gallery and the artist, Glenday's third solo exhibition at Courbet, titled “Relationalities” (which opened in the front gallery on April 29 and has migrated to the center gallery) explores a sculptural body of work incorporating autobiographical elements from the artist’s ancestry dating back to the 18th-century Dutch trade of Chinese porcelain. The works in the exhibition are a collection of cast vessels along with wheel-thrown porcelain vessels with endemic minerals and oxides gleaned from the natural world around her, acting as paint upon the delicate, meticulously thrown porcelain canvas.

About Peter Speliopoulos:

Peter Speliopoulos is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Springfield, Massachusetts, of Greek descent, who currently lives and works between New York and Patmos, Greece. He received his BFA from the Parsons School of Design and established an international career as a high fashion designer and costume designer for opera and modern ballet. His designs and creative direction have inspired the collections of Christian Dior, Cerruti and Donna Karan among others; his costume designs significantly figured in the work of director/choreographers Karole Armitage and Luca Veggetti.

On June 10th, his sophomore show, CHTHONIC, opened at Ateliers Courbet. Created throughout the evolution of the pandemic in his Hudson Valley Cellar Studio, the work is an interpretive approach to the Primordial Gods of the Greek underworld. Full of texture, sweeping forms, and personality these works highlight his passion for craftsmanship, organic textures and his long standing fascination for and experimentation with the medium. This collection of highly textured and adorned vessels reflects the artist’s interest in the malleability and tactile expressions of clay as well as a personal and contemporary investigation of masculinity, femininity, and the time honored techniques of the traditional wheel-thrown forms of Antiquity.