Photograph by Jesper Bundgaard.
Danish-born and British-trained, with an active exhibiting practice in Europe and Asia, Anders Herwald Ruhwald is nonetheless right at home in the story of American ceramics. He was head of ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art for a decade, following in the footsteps of Maija Grotell. While living in the Detroit area, he created an atmospheric, somber, and impressive meditation on urban upheaval, transforming an entire apartment into a permanent art installation in monochrome charred black. The space is populated with his nearly abstract, nearly figural objects, onto whose surfaces he often left the impression of his innumerable fingerprints—as if to say, “I was here.”
Since relocating to Chicago with his partner, Marie Herwald Hermann, Ruhwald has continued his suggestive stagings of objects in space, including a powerful installation in Italy at the former home of Danish avantgardiste Asger Jorn. For Objects: USA 2020, Ruhwald has developed thinking from that project, presenting an upright, totemic ceramic sculpture suggestive of a body. Standing at almost six feet, it encapsulates the sense of a bodily duality. It is, Ruhwald says, “caught between an exterior perceived representation, and an interior experienced emotion.” Created in Ruhwald’s studio over the course of weeks, the heavily wrought sculpture captures a fleeting and fractured sense of time.
A Measure of Two sculpture in glazed ceramic. Designed and made by Anders Ruhwald, USA, 2020.
21" L x 22" W x 65.75" H
53.3cm L x 55.9cm W x 167cm H
SP1379
Courtesy of Volume Gallery