Have you heard? We’re launching a once-in-a-lifetime auction Monday, July 3. We are super excited to share with you this amazing collection of ceramic works from over 60 artists. Leading up to the auction, we’ve decided to asked a few of the artists, who donated work, to speak to Cfile’s role in their lives. We jump off this series with Eric Zetterquist.
Cfile: What keeps you coming back to Cfile.org?
C-file is now the most important news source for art, design and architecture utilizing the ceramic medium. Its breadth of interests and perspectives on the subject is unparalleled.
Can you recall and speak to any one moment when Cfile.org blew your mind?
My mind is consistently blown by C-file’s ability to unearth news items about obscure artists and technical developments from all over the world. No single publication has been able to cover the globe as thoroughly and with so much success.
Describe the your work as an artist?
In my effort to bridge centuries and sensibilities, I have portrayed a 14th – 15th century Thai vessel in an almost cartoonish hip-hop culture fashion. This piece was created especially for an exhibition in a university art museum in Bangkok. I wanted to do something super-contemporary to draw the eyes of the students and get them to concentrate on the timelessness of certain forms vocabularies.
Sneak peek!
Eric Zetterquist
Si Satchanalai Vessel with Notched Neck, Ayutthaya Period, 1350 – 1767 A.D., Thailand, 2016
Print. 17 x 17”. Edition 1/5.
Value $4,000
Gift of the artist.
Passport Item: Object Portraits a book by Eric Zetterquist.
For over a thousand years the Chinese have painted portraits of art objects in their collections, both to extol the esthetic virtues of an object and to exhibit the accomplishments of a collector. Following and contemporizing this practice, Eric Zetterquist has created a series of portraits of Asian ceramics dating from 2500 B.C. – 1400 A.D.. He has done this by isolating minute form elements of the object, and highlighting the negative space created by them. He further reduces and abstracts these forms by creating large-scale, flattened images in black and white with “painterly” edges.
Eric Zetterquist’s dual careers as a photographer and an expert in Asian antiquities which led to the “Object Portrait” series of highly abstracted details of ancient ceramics. It is an ultimate East-Meets-West and Old-Meets-New project that reveals his early influences of Sugimoto, Ellsworth Kelly, and the countless Song Dynasty masterpieces that he has handled over the last two decades. Originally developed as a way to help his clients understand how we perceive the nuances of form, these large scaled works, more like ink painting than photographs, have become popular in their own right, selling into several private collections in the United States, Japan and Hong Kong.
Read Cfile’s writings and musing on Zetterquist here.
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