Ateliers Courbet is pleased to present new porcelain works by South African artist-ceramicist Katherine Glenday. In continuation of a ten-year collaboration, the artist’s fifth exhibition at the gallery features a new body of porcelain works that incorporate art historical references and time-honored techniques. Exploring the relationship between hue and form, the colorful porcelain works highlight Glenday’s ongoing investigation of porcelain’s range of expressive qualities that she has continued to hone for over forty years.

“This new body of work extends an invitation for pause and contemplation. Through placements of similar vessel forms within a limited range of tones, I reference qualities that leading abstract expressionist painters have achieved in the past. The work of Agnes Martin is perhaps the most clear inspiration.Her work emanates quietude and has come to be synonymous with ‘space-making’.

While many of Martin’s paintings have stabilizing horizontal stripes that invoke landscape, these narrow vessels reach upwards. I see them as ‘organ pipes of colour’ invoking a sense of vibratory sound. They exist simply as contemplative objects.

Unlike the staticity of paintings, these collections submit to fluid arrangements, constantly engaging with ambient plays of light as their ensembles change.It is never the single object, but rather the group in relation which informs the experience.

With various interchangeable colors, these vessels stand silently together, adaptable through human touch. These are mutable works, ever open to interpretation and individual response, acting as a marker for the ubiquitous state of being human. Finding myself unable to resist rearranging the tonal collections as they assemble in my studio, relationships of hue and form come about in new ways which I myself have not foreseen.”- Katherine Glenday