Design | “Matter of Fact” Posits Alternative Ceramics History for Israel

TEL AVIV, Israel — It’s not often we write about ceramics as a medium to explore an alternate future, but that was the theme of Matter of Fact at the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center in Israel this summer. The exhibition, curated by Johnathan Hopp and Maya Ben David, asks what might have been had the country’s largest ceramics manufacturer, Lapid, hadn’t closed its doors in 1990.

Above image: “Matter of Fact” exhibition view. “Wheel Painting” works by Shay Nipossi and Andrey Grishko. Photographs by Shahar Tamir and Shay Ben Efraim.

This gives the 14 designers and studios on exhibition more than 25 years of history to re-imagine. How could the aesthetics of Lapid carried on in the intervening years? How might Lapid have changed the direction of Israel’s ceramics in the same time? The world’s? These are impossible questions to answer, but they’re a lot of fun to ask.

As I was digging around for more information about Lapid, I came across Retro Pottery Net, whose writer wrote that the grace of Lapid’s work was unmatched by the dearth of information about it:

Sadly there is very little documented about the history and work of the Lapid Pottery Works in Tel Aviv, Israel – formed shortly after the state of Israel was formed post WW2 in1949. The earliest pieces I have seen from this pottery are around 1952, very glossy and nowhere near as sophisticated in design as work which was to soon follow once the pottery was more established, and began exporting. From what I can gather the pottery closed in the 1980’s.

I have only ever found one useful reference to Lapid Pottery, which is a paragraph in the book “Art in Israel” by Benjamin Tammuz published in 1963 by Chilton Company U.S.

“Elspeth Cohen, designer for the Lapid factory , has also been responsible for some of the best Israeli ceramics. Her style is clean, austere and classical and in some ways reminiscent of contemporary Scandinavian design. It is unfortunate that Lapid is not equipped to produce large tableware, since her talent is admirable suited to this field” 

That seems to be about it as far as documented history sadly.  I agree that Lapid is certainly reminiscent of Danish Design at the time, which is probably what attracts me to collecting it – I have a collection of about 100 pieces to date. What I love about it is the pure Modernist nature of it – with the wonderful patterns, colours and designs. There isn’t anything else quite like it.

The ceramics center states of the show:

For five decades, Lapid – whose products were ubiquitous and familiar in almost every household in Israel – supplied cheap and functional housewares and sanitary ceramics to the local market. In the 1990s, the factory, one of the last ceramic housewares factories in Israel, was closed down.

The imagined factory whose products and processes are presented in this exhibition is based on Lapid as a case study for the entire Israeli ceramics industry. The participants in the exhibition stepped into the shoes of the designers in this imaginary factory, developing new collections that reflect their world view in terms of functionality, localism, efficiency, production, and aesthetics.

The lower gallery presents the final products of the research, design, and production processes detailed in elaboration in the top gallery. Each project offers a unique interpretation to the idea of local factory through interventions in the means of production, raw materials, material processing, and decorations. The works featured in this exhibition constitute a possible vision, a proposal that reflects how a local ceramics industry might exist today, and in what ways we as a culture could have benefited from it.

Do you love or loathe this use of contemporary ceramics? Let us know in the comments.