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Céramique contemporaine.
10 ans d'acquisitions par la Ville de La Louvière
Since the museum opened in 2015, convinced of the need to support artistic creation and to enrich its own collections, the City of La Louvière has allocated an annual budget to Keramis for the acquisition of art by contemporary ceramic artists. This annual budget initiated by Danièle Staquet, alderman for Culture, has over the past decade significantly strengthened the museum’s contemporary collection. Half of the works displayed in this new exhibition are owned by the City of La Louvière and are on permanent deposit to Keramis. Building on this momentum, Keramis has over the past decade also benefited from donations from private individuals keen to see the collections grow and the museum thrive. These include collectors, galleries, families of deceased artists and sometimes from artists whose careers are accomplished, such as Quinette Meister (1930). The exhibition begins in the entrance hall with works by Pierre Caille (1911–1996) and Antoine de Vinck (1924–1992), two major figures in Belgian ceramics from the second half of the 20th century whose families entrusted significant collections to Keramis. Through these bequests, the museum fulfills its duty to preserve the memory of these artists while enabling art historians to study these collections. Furthermore, through its own programming and artist residencies, and as an active observer of the contemporary art scene, Keramis is equally committed to discovering, promoting, and supporting emerging talent. This involves in particular, the acquisition of very recent and artistically innovative works. Enriching a museum collection with contemporary art is as much a bet on the future as the assurance of being of one’s time and a restitution of the creative energy of an artistic ecosystem. The works presented in this exhibition were created between 1956 and 2025. They explore the artists‘ relationship to landscape, nature, and the human body. These themes form the backbone of the museum’s contemporary acquisition policy. While not set in stone, they act as a red thread ensuring the long-term coherence and distinctiveness of the collection. This exhibition represents only a selection of the works acquired since 2015. The Keramis collection has also been enriched by works of art from: Marie-Henriette Bataille, Francis Behets, Charlotte Coquen, Corneille, Coralie Courbet, Rik Delrue, Ernest D’Hossche, Marc Feulien, Maryna Handysh, Sixtine Jacquart, Anne Leclercq, Elisabeth Lincot, Hugo Meert, Kee Tea Rha, Noël Randaxhe, Roger Somville, Piet Stockmans, Jan Van De Kerckhove and many others.
Sans titre
Pierre Caille
1982-1983
Gelakt/Lacquered wood
Ville de La Louvière
Belgium’s first ceramic sculptor, Pierre Caille (1911–1996) discovered ceramics at the Boch Frères Keramis pottery factory in 1936. The company was then at the height of its success. An experimenter with clay, metal and wood, and a skilled draughtsman, Pierre Caille spent his life exploring the realms of derision, fantasy and even the grotesque. Among his most recurring themes are the walking man, forks, hands and even lewd scenes.
This wooden sculpture is a gesture of greeting – not the solemn ‘Appel’ by the artist Idel Ianchelevici, installed at the entrance to the city of La Louvière, but the simple, everyday gesture of someone saying hello or goodbye. This work echoes the spirit of hospitality that is inseparable from the identity of La Louvière, a city rich in more than 96 nationalities, stemming from the numerous waves of immigration triggered by rapid industrialisation since the city’s founding in the mid-19th century.
Miroir d’âme
Antoine de Vinck
1980-1982
Glazed stoneware, wooden box
Keramis
Several dozen works from Antoine de Vinck’s final studio and home in Treigny in Yonne (FR), a stone’s throw from the famous Château de Ratilly, were donated in 2016 by Alice de Vinck, the artist’s widow. A region renowned for its stoneware, Puisaye became Antoine de Vinck’s adopted home, which he frequented from the early 1950s onwards.
Antoine de Vinck was the spokesperson of a revival in stoneware pottery, following in the artistic footsteps of Bernard Leach, the first English Studio potter. De Vinck was also the author of the first French translation of Leach’s famous work, A Potter’s Book. In addition to his high-quality functional pottery, Antoine de Vinck was an original sculptor, seeking purity of form and stylisation. He highlighted the links between ancient civilisations and their universal sense of the sacred.
This wall-mounted box, part of the series Miroirs d’âme, was exhibited during the retrospective dedicated to Antoine de Vinck by the Royal Museum of Mariemont in 1986. The Miroir d’âme is, metaphorically speaking, a point of self-reflection and a gateway to the cosmos.
Le cavalier au plumet
Pierre Caille
c.1955
Glazed stoneware
Keramis
This work by Pierre Caille, entitled Le cavalier au plumet, dates from the second half of the 1950s. Since 1948, Pierre Caille has directed the ceramics workshop at La Cambre (National Higher School of Decorative Arts) where he taught ‘the fundamentals of a form of ceramics in which reason gives way to free imagination, where function is subordinate to the spontaneous creative act’ (Émile Langui, 1973).
This sculpture illustrates this idea perfectly. It is a world away from what ceramic art had to offer at that time. The work consists of closed volumes, so that the horse and its rider merge into a single imaginary being. This formal approach creates multiple areas of rich textures, sometimes smooth, sometimes rough, in nuanced shades of white, black, brown and beige. Like his 1947 Coq bleu (part of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles collections on loan to Keramis), Le cavalier au plumet is an essential milestone for understanding the artist’s sculptural direction in the aftermath of the Second World War. Donated by the non-profit organisation Pierre Caille to Keramis, this work has been restored thanks to the support of the Marie-Louise Jacques Foundation for Contemporary Belgian Sculpture.
Canis Lingua
Marc Alberghina
2015
Glazed earthenware
Ville de La Louvière
First acquisition in 2015 by the City of La Louvière, this triptych forms part of a series simply titled Canis Lingua. Marc Alberghina hails from Vallauris (FR), a town renowned for its vernacular pottery. The artist draws direct inspiration from his town’s history and its stories. He sometimes reuses industrial forms that once existed (here, the large dishes in the background), and at other times industrial glazes salvaged from abandoned factories or those in the process of being dismantled. The enamel on these tongues is a layering of milky white, which melts at 930°C, and an industrial pink marketed by L’Hospied, a famous manufacturer in Vallauris. Marc Alberghina found several kilos of it in the disused workshop of Robert Picault (1919–2000).
Regarding the subject matter, as is the case here, the artist seeks to seduce as much as to horrify. These are indeed oversized human tongues. In French, there is no shortage of expressions involving the tongue. The chosen title refers to the Latin expression canis lingua, which the artist translates as ‘malicious tongue’. And whilst the artist refers to language as a vehicle of culture, he also evokes taste, good food and… sexuality. As for the number three, it refers as much to balance and perfection as to the spiritual and the Trinity.
Oiseau
Françoise Pétrovitch
2018
Glazed stoneware, cotton cushion
Keramis
A painter and draughtswoman whose talent is now internationally recognised, Françoise Pétrovitch has also turned to sculpture to translate the imagination of her images into three-dimensional form. Her sculptures can be found in bronze – sometimes monumental, as in the park at the Louvre-Lens (FR) – and in ceramic, as is the case here.
Through her work, the artist explores themes of people, the transition from childhood to adolescence, and an imagined animal world. In 2019, she created a large-scale installation entitled Passer à travers for the Galerie des enfants at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Françoise Pétrovitch has worked in various ceramic studios, some modest, others prestigious, such as the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres. This small sculpture is one of three pieces she created during a residency at the Keramis studio in collaboration with the ceramicist Olivia Mortier. The bird appears unconscious, yet it exudes a touching gentleness, resting like an offering on this immaculate cushion. Two other works have joined the Keramis collections, Jane and Peau d’âne. In the latter, the artist revisits Perrault’s fairy tale as well as the Electra complex to which it refers.
Wicked flower 5
Clémence van Lunen
2012
Glazed stoneware
Ville de La Louvière
A distinctive figure in contemporary ceramics, Clémence van Lunen has a unique relationship with ceramic materials. For her, the visual language is a language in its own right that does not need to be the translation or interpretation of a concept. For Clémence van Lunen, meaning does not precede experience; it arises from the encounter, on the one hand with the subject, and on the other, with the clay itself, considered in its mass. Her working process is reminiscent of direct carving. This is why she begins by creating a small-scale model in clay, which is fired and already glazed. This method allows her to spatialise the work in its entirety before overcoming the pitfalls of firing.
Whereas a potter begins a pot from the base, Clémence van Lunen conceives her sculptures from a multitude of angles. This involves both modelling and carving. She uses all sorts of tools and unconventional techniques. “I often find myself sawing the clay,” she admits. Born in Brussels, Clémence van Lunen studied sculpture at the École Supérieure des Arts de l’image Le 75 before moving on to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
La Cascade
Gisèle Buthod-Garçon
2016
Fireclay
Ville de La Louvière
On her return from Senegal in 1979, Gisèle Buthod-Garçon felt drawn to ceramics. From 1982 onwards, she experimented tirelessly. Her study trips, discovering the potters of Fayoum (EG) in 1991 and Burkina Faso between 1992 and 1996, provided her with lasting inspiration.
Both the form and its treatment are characteristic of her precise and incisive approach. Gisèle Buthod-Garçon opts for lively forms that are constantly renewed, series after series.
This piece is titled Cascade due to the shimmering of its surface. She fires her sculptures once before opting for a spectacular smoking or raku firing. The glazes she applies are unusually rich and burst into flames to fuse with the clay. The artist masters the incandescence of a particularly demanding process on large pieces.
As the first ceramist to resettle in Saint Quentin-la-Poterie (FR) in 1984, she inspired a younger generation of ceramists to follow her and work there collectively. This large, powerful piece was exhibited at the Musée de la Piscine in Roubaix (FR).
Holy
Valérie Delarue
2016
Glazed stoneware
Ville de La Louvière
This glazed stoneware sculpture is entitled Holy and evokes sacred nature, the elevation of the body and metamorphosis. A pair of female feet appear to float on a carpet of orchid petals. Valérie Delarue frequently draws on her personal experience of the forest. The forest and the undergrowth form a magical and wonderful world, which can also be mysterious and frightening. It is the forest of her dreams, that of her childhood, of Sunday walks, of her father’s treehouse, of picnics under the trees, of the smell of mushrooms after the rain. Delarue belongs to a family for whom a daily connection with living things is a matter of course. In her view, human beings are an element of nature on a par with all others.
Valérie Delarue trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the studio of Georges Jeanclos (1933–2007). She subsequently studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (US) under Viola Frey (1933–2004). She undertook several residencies at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres (FR), where she created the performance piece Chambre d’argile.
The sculpture Holy was acquired following the artist’s participation in the exhibition Les Bucoliques. Allégories du vivant in 2024.
Futon
Ninon Hivert
2023
Earthenware
Ville de La Louvière
Ninon Hivert’s ceramics are sculptural interpretations of recognisable objects drawn from everyday life and often associated with the body (clothing, blankets, etc.). The artist regards her work as an ‘archaeology of the present’.
The objects are first photographed, after which their images are used to create fully modelled sculptures. This process allows for a fictional rewriting, the whole point of the approach lies in the permeable boundary between reality and fiction.
Soft objects miraculously stand upright; the clothes seem to come from another place, materialising the memory of the people who wore them yesterday, of their moving bodies, of their beating hearts. The oxides place the works halfway between sculpture and painting, reality and unreality. Mimetic without being overly so, the colours applied by the artist are those of urban cultures and of a humanity that vibrates endlessly.
Ninon Hivert was born in 1995 in Les Lillas, Seine-Saint-Denis (FR), and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She now lives and works in Montpellier.
Sans titre (Orange Sphere),Sans titre (Large Yellow and Blue Bowl)
Antonino Spoto
2013
Fine earthenware
Keramis
An anaesthetist, a profession he still practises, Antonino Spoto began a ceramics course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Charleroi in 1995. He was then warmly welcomed by the potter Antonio Lampecco in Maredret, who passed on his virtuoso mastery of the potter’s wheel to him.
Most of Spoto’s works are created on the potter’s wheel. His forms are simple, they consist of cups, bowls and partially or fully enclosed volumes. The artist applies several thick layers of unfired glaze to the bisque using a spray gun, meaning it retains a high degree of mattness to trap the light. This technique allows him to alter the viewer’s perception of volume. The bowl, yellow on the outside, reflects light whilst its blue surface absorbs it. The large sphere, a technical feat, appears to absorb light through a discreet opening. In all cases, such formal exercises surprise with the apparent simplicity of the means employed.
In the middle of
Nathalie Doyen
2017
White and black stoneware
Ville de La Louvière
Nathalie Doyen’s ceramic practice focuses on the intimacy of the gesture in relation to the environment. An installation entitled Un souffle sous mes paupières (A breath beneath my eyelids), installed in the lobby of the Royal Museum of Mariemont, consists of a constellation of porcelain sticks suspended by cotton threads.
The artist has also created wall drawings using raw clay pellets. In this vein, for several years now, by patiently punching the surface of clay blocks, she has been recreating the texture of a thick fabric. Nathalie Doyen trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tournai between 1983 and 1987 in the studios of Francis Behets and Richard Owczarek. She subsequently pursued a career as a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Namur.
Topographie inventée
Marc Feulien
1977
Stoneware, steel, mercury, Plexiglas
Keramis
Besides being a leading figure in the French-speaking Belgian contemporary art scene of the 1980s, Marc Feulien (1943–2005) was also a sculptor who gave ceramics a central place in his work.
Following a series of hyperrealist sculptures, from 1982 onwards he created a series entitled ‘Invented Topography’, in which he drew inspiration from the industrial landscapes of the Charleroi region, where he was born and where he taught at the School of Fine Arts.
As Jo Dustin notes: « Feulien constructs strange semi-landscapes, resembling the ruins of ancient cities viewed from the sky, whose dark colours—of ash and scorched earth—lend the reliefs an unusual magic. Sometimes, in the hollow of a furrow, within the wound of a crater, shines—like eternal water—the silver of a streak of mercury.” (L’Écho de la Bourse, 13 May 1983).
Sans titre (7 half-cubes)
Quinette Meister
c.2010
Smoke-fired stoneware
Keramis
Discreet as an artist, Quinette Meister began working with ceramics in the 1970s. Her work can be associated with Constructivist art due to its formal economy, or to the paintings of Pierre Soulages for a shared affinity for black.
In her sculptural practice, the artist cuts solid stoneware cubes with intersecting diagonals, creating her forms by removing certain sections that then interact with one another. Another characteristic of her approach is the deep black achieved through smoking at the end of the firing process. This unusual process, which is highly rewarding when mastered, led her to Japan, where in 1981 she enrolled at the private Tandai School, in the class of the ceramist Hideyuki Hayashi (1937–2025). The two artists remained close throughout their lives.
Sans titre (Landscape)
Quinette Meister
c.1985
Smoke-fired stoneware
Keramis
During her stays in Japan, Quinette Meister also had the opportunity to practise black firing at the studio of the famous Japanese potter Kazuo Yagi (1918–1979), one of the five founders of the Sodeisha group. The landscape shown here was fired in Japan on that occasion.
Following two exhibitions in Kyoto and Tokyo in 1985, Quinette Meister returned to Paris and presented her work at the Kisaragi Gallery in 1987. It proved to be a revelation, three works were acquired by the National Ceramics Museum in Sèvres.
The second piece to enter the Keramis collections is a series of sliced cubes arranged in a row. In the 2000s, Quinette Meister’s exploration of rhythm could be likened to musique concrète. According to Frédéric Bodet, they stem from a form of ‘spiritual intoxication’ (Chateauroux, 2011). Now aged 96, Quinette Meister has recently ceased creating new works.
Vois-là
Émile Desmedt
2018
Salt-glazed stoneware
Ville de La Louvière
Since 2015, the monumental sculpture État II has welcomed visitors outside, near the museum forecourt. Shaped and fired on site in 2015, this true artistic and technical tour de force perfectly encapsulates Émile Desmedt’s approach.
This smaller sculpture, situated in the centre of the room, is entitled Vois-là. Desmedt’s titles always reflect his intentions. Vois-là draws the viewer in through its presence, through the immediacy and clarity of its message. Here we find the two inseparable dimensions of his work: the choice of primary natural forms, plant or animal and the mark of fire fixing, without diminishing their powerful inner vitality. Desmedt’s inspiration also stems from his childhood spent on his parents’ small farm in Rumillies (Tournai).
In 1984, following his first professional experience, Desmedt enrolled in the ceramics course at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Tournai, in the studio of Richard Owczarek and Francis Behets. His encounter with ceramics sparked a profound inner transformation, making his commitment to an artistic career absolutely vital.
Sans titre (pair of vases)
David Whitehead
n.d.
Wood-fired stoneware
Ville de La Louvière
David Whitehead was born in South Africa in 1959. After working as a surveyor for five years, he discovered ceramics in Cape Town (SA) in 1986. He subsequently undertook placements in the United Kingdom, Scotland, Greece and South Africa with Allan Bain, Mick Arnold, Lynda Whitty and Nico Liedenberg.
It was in France, in La Borne in the Berry region, that he chose to settle within the village community of wood-firing artists. The forms he creates are simple and powerful, blends of different stoneware shaped using the coil method. When the clay reaches a leather-like consistency, he applies engobes of kaolin and barium carbonate, which react with the ash from the firing wood.
Derelict vessel
Frank Steyaert
2017
Stoneware, glazes and engobes
Keramis
In the 1980s, Frank Steyaert began creating ceramic shipwrecks with the precision of a model-maker. He used glaze, but above all coloured engobes, to reproduce different materials, such as wood here, in a highly illusionistic manner.
However, this quest for illusion is not the ultimate aim of his work. His oeuvre is above all symbolist. Such ships function as memento mori, expressing the vanity of earthly life. This piece, created for his retrospective at Keramis in 2017, offers a unique perspective. The crates spilling from the holds of the gutted ship symbolise the desire to pass on the vast collection of ancient and contemporary ceramics amassed by the artist.
In accordance with the artist’s wishes, the ship on display here will enable him to journey into the afterlife, symbolically surrounded by a collection that inspired him throughout his life. The front section of the ship is detachable and serves as a funeral urn. Deeply attached to the idea of remaining within the museum, he will continue to live on there through his art, his collected works and perhaps even through his ashes, which his relatives may one day place inside it.
Série Grandes têtes
Jean‑Pierre Larocque
2005-2006
Glazed ceramic
Fondation Roi Baudouin Canada
These two monumental works were very recently donated to Keramis, via the King Baudouin Foundation Canada, by a Belgian collector of the artist’s work living in Quebec City (CA). Jean-Pierre Larocque studied at Concordia University in Montreal (CA) and at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University (US). He then taught at various American schools between 1988 and 1995 before joining the teaching staff at the University of California, Long Beach (US). Now based in Quebec City, his highly figurative, large-scale ceramics, depicting horses or large heads, have earned him significant recognition across the Atlantic.
In his monumental heads and busts with exaggerated features, Larocque succeeds in creating a grotesque expression reminiscent of the famous Vertumnus portrait (composed of fruit and vegetables) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Milan 1527–1593). Larocque’s sculptures are constructed by layering numerous strips or pieces of clay, folded and flattened to create a false impression of improvisation. This technique allows the artist to paint psychological portraits dominated by a certain uncertainty and an inner void.
Fulgure
Coline Rosoux
2019
Glazed stoneware
Ville de La Louvière
A strange horse’s head combined with human hands, Coline Rosoux’s Fulgure is a psychopomp, meaning it has the power to accompany the deceased from one world to another. In various mythologies, particularly in Scandinavia, horses work alongside guides or other reapers.
Fulgure is smiling, both human and animal at once, his gestures are consequently absurd. Among the artists of her generation, Coline Rosoux, while studying at La Cambre, was one of the first to develop such figurative ceramics inspired by pagan myths, magic, childhood and dreams. Born in Fontenay-Le-Comte (FR), she graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Angers (FR) and from ENSAV – La Cambre in Brussels, where she now lives and works.
Sans titre
Wayne Fisher
2018
Glazed ceramic
Ville de La Louvière
After studying art, physics and astronomy between 1972 and 1978, Wayne Fisher chose to devote himself to ceramics. Working with porcelain, he seeks to represent life as it appears in mysterious and elusive forms. His forms are subtly gendered, ethereal, and precariously balanced.
He works with double-layered slabs using a highly skilled technique and applies his layers of glaze with a spray gun. After firing at 1220°, the glaze is patiently sandblasted until the surface resembles skin beneath which life pulsates. Fischer lives and works in Le Revest-les-Eaux, a French commune in the Var department of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.
Lévrier bleu, Présence rouge
Manuel Sánchez Algora
2023
Glazed ceramic
Keramis
The Spanish artist Manuel Sánchez Algora combines humour and poetry in visually striking scenes. He brings together the ordinary and the extraordinary, sometimes parodying modernist artists or social phenomena.
He uses modelling and casting to shape his small interior monuments. Where necessary, he juggles with formats worthy of the decorative garden statuary he mocks. The Madrid-based artist owes his mastery of ceramic techniques to his father and uncle, the twins Manuel and Vicente Sánchez Algora. In the 1950s, the two craftsmen founded Cerámicas Algora in Madrid, Spain, a factory producing popular decorative ceramics.
Manuel began an apprenticeship there which he continued at the School of Arts and Crafts, the La Moncloa School of Ceramics – where he has also been a teacher for over 30 years – and then at the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Alongside his teaching work, he practises drawing, painting and artistic ceramics in his studio in Villaviciosa de Odón.
Manekineko - Justice
Sayaka Oishi
2023
Semi-porcelain
Keramis
According to Sayaka Oishi, the work is deliberately part of a quest for hyper-decoration, offering a syncretic vision of the world—a complex space where the human, the animal, the plant and even the inorganic intertwine. The artist revisits the theme of the Manekineko, the popular figure of the cat that brings good luck and ensures prosperity. This small sculpture is teeming with detail; its gesture is both friendly and assertive.
Sayaka Oishi is a ceramic artist born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1980. She obtained her BFA in ceramics from Kyoto City University of Arts in 2004. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are part of collections in Japan, South Korea and the United States.
This piece entered the Keramis collection following its inclusion in the exhibition ‘Vivant et en devenir’ at the Delta in Namur as part of the Perspective 2025 Ceramics Festival.
Concrétion
Thérèse Lebrun
2018
Porcelain
Keramis
Thérèse Lebrun gathers seeds, plant stems and achenes from the natural world. She coats them in liquid porcelain and assembles them to create coral-like structures, as if plucked straight from the most ancient times. She draws the essence of her forms from the living world. As the semiologist Erwin Panofsky asserted, does art not possess “the conscious capacity to produce objects in the same way that nature produces phenomena”?
It is between the object and the phenomenon that Thérèse Lebrun’s work lies. A practice linked to a long process: that of nature dying and transforming. After firing, the porcelain reveals what once existed, bearing witness to a sowing that has become uncertain.
Grand vase turquoise
Sofi van Saltbommel
2000
Glazed stoneware
Ville de La Louvière
After completing an artistic secondary education, Sofi van Saltbommel went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (1996) and Brussels (1999). While she was a sculpture student in Belgium, ceramics was going through a period of disrepute in the eyes of the contemporary art world. Nevertheless, drawn to the medium, she enrolled in Thérèse Lebrun’s classes at the Ixelles School of Arts.
This sculptural vase dates from the end of her ceramic studies. Monumental, organic and unsettling, it is above all anthropomorphic. It clearly establishes the link between van Saltbommel’s initial approach to the fine arts where modelling is central, and her intention to use ceramics to create a dialogue between volume and colour. Currently, the artist produces more figurative and theatrical works, combining different media, notably textiles. This piece is an essential milestone in understanding the artist’s creative journey.
Paysage Shigaraki
Daniel Pontoreau
2006
Ceramic and anagama debris
Ville de La Louvière
Since the 1970s, Daniel Pontoreau has been exploring a metaphysical strand of ceramic sculpture in which form establishes a dialogue by turns, with the material in its mineral historicity and with the cosmos. His approach precedes the landscape insofar as the concept of landscape refers to the age of humanity, whereas the material predates it.
In addition to ceramics, the artist uses other raw materials such as glass, cast iron or marble, drawing on their symbolic values. This stoneware slab, studded with fragments of refractory bricks from an anagama kiln in Shigaraki (Japan), symbolically transports the viewer through time and space.
Born in 1947 in Paris, Daniel Pontoreau is one of the leading figures of the French ‘new ceramics’ movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Demonstrating great technical skill, the artist’s creations are very often of impressive dimensions and engage in a dialogue with architecture or the environment.
La croix est marquée
Chantal Talbot
c.1980
Mixed media
Keramis
Trained in ceramics in Michel Smolders’ studio at the École supérieure des Arts Le 75 in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert during the 1980s, Chantal Talbot was among the first artists to reconnect with painted motifs on clay slabs combined with mixed materials such as wood, metal and lead. In 1986, she received the first prize at the International Mino Competition in Japan.
She occasionally draws references from cinema, as in Seven Samurai, the 1954 film by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, which also gave its title to an installation previously acquired for the Keramis collections. In the 1990s, Chantal Talbot abandoned ceramics to devote herself to painting on canvas and panel. Her work opened up an unexpected field of experimentation within the museum’s collections.
Hula hoop
Claire Lézier
2018
Glazed ceramic
Ville de La Louvière
French ceramic artist Claire Lézier grew up in Nantes. Between 2007 and 2010, she studied ceramics at the École supérieure des métiers d’art d’Arras (ESMAA) under supervision of ceramicists Haguiko and Jean-Pierre Viot.
In 2016, Keramis invited Claire Lézier and Coline Rosoux to take part in the exhibition La terre paysage. Together, the two ceramic artists formed the duo M700K (“minimum 700 kilos of clay”). They became known for creating large dreamlike landscapes in raw clay (Tourinnes-la-Grosse in 2015, Brass in 2017).
Alongside this collaboration, Lézier has developed a personal body of work characterised by a highly spontaneous approach in which technique serves narration. She creates landscape boxes intended to remain accessible, candlesticks shaped like terrifying dragons, grotesque figures or, as here, a ring of fire. Without burdening herself with unnecessary or cumbersome questions, the artist draws from a boundless imagination nourished by urban culture, cinema, comics and graphic novels.
This ring of fire in glazed earthenware is a delightful truism. By presenting fire and its effects in such a literal manner, the artist ridicules the ponderous and indigestible discourse that has surrounded ceramics since the late nineteenth century. With Claire Lézier, accounts are settled, the page is turned: ceramics has been dusted off and must henceforth belong entirely to our own time.
Orgue, Amour et Délice
Patrick Crulis
2020
Glazed stoneware
Ville de La Louvière
A graduate in painting from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Patrick Crulis has developed an unconventional approach that draws inspiration from both art history (Expressionism, the German Neue Wilde, Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), the COBRA movement) as on urban cultures. In his way of working, Crulis rejects precision and the pursuit of perfection. He greatly prefers chaos to order, spontaneity to calculation.
This work forms part of a broader investigation into the figure of Clotho, the Greek goddess who spins the thread of life and whose existence reminds the artist of Camille Claudel.
The title Orgue, Amour et Délice derives from a mnemonic phrase used in French grammar to remember nouns that change gender depending on number: masculine in the singular, feminine in the plural. The phrase embodies the ideal of formal and conceptual deconstruction that Crulis places at the centre of his work.
The question of gender is central here in his reflection on the history of art, which long privileged male artists and their female models. This issue intersects with another: the legacy of a modernity founded on macho principles, perceptible in this iconic tubular chair commonly attributed to Le Corbusier, though it was in fact designed by Charlotte Perriand.
Trophée bois n°1
Caroline Andrin
2025
Clay, ash glaze
Projet acquisition Ville de La Louvière
Since 1998, Caroline Andrin has been developing works made from porcelain slip poured into complex moulds created from a variety of materials. The relationship between positive and negative as a principle of transformation, as well as the relational dimension, forms the foundation of her conceptual practice.
With Send It By Mail, a series of vases made from cardboard tubes received through the post, she incorporates the participation of a social group into her artistic process. Several families of textile objects, chosen for their intimate relationship to the body - such as woollen hats, latex bathing caps, nylon stockings and leather gloves - have led her to create a number of series revisiting our relationship to animality.
By cutting apart and resewing pairs of gloves or orphaned gloves into new forms and pouring slip directly inside them, she creates a world of shapes linked to the stereotype of the hunting trophy (Licornes, Skin Game...) or to ancient rhytons. This Wood Trophy No. 1 was fired in the Keramis Girel 3E kiln in 2025.
Équilibre vertébral
Nathalie Doyen
2002
Alignment of stoneware slabs
Ville de La Louvière
Acquired by the City of La Louvière in 2007, this work, which undulates through space, is composed of several hundred terracotta slabs whose initial profile gradually evolves and transforms. It evokes the principles of genetics and the evolution of species. As its title suggests, it metaphorically refers to the spinal column and, more broadly, to the structures of living organisms.
The repetition of a form or gesture and its occupation of space constitute the principal axes of Nathalie Doyen’s visual research and her unmistakable signature.
This installation on loan from the Mill, the municipal museum currently closed for renovation works, fits perfectly within the Keramis collection which focuses on artists’ relationships to landscape, nature and the body. Nathalie Doyen studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tournai between 1983 and 1987 in the studios of Francis Behets and Richard Owczarek.
Sans titre (collage)
Pierre Caille
1965
Collage
Keramis
An indefatigable artist whose works punctuate this selection, this diptych reveals another essential dimension of Pierre Caille’s practice: collage. The archive collection from the artist’s studio preserved at Keramis contains hundreds of such works.
Pierre Caille used whatever came to hand, be it newspaper clippings, invitations, photographs, stamps and more. He cuts, pastes and recombines them, sometimes even highlighting them with drawings or gouache. These two collages schematically depict two figures almost drawn from the world of childhood.
These works form part of a major donation made to Keramis by the artist’s family. They were created in 1965, following the important exhibition held at the Chalette Gallery in New York in 1963. During this exhibition, the principle of collage — whether through glazed terracotta slabs assembled into sculptural groups or through torn paper — became firmly established in his work.
A true polymath, the artist painted and drew freely, working with sheet metal, bronze, wood and naturally ceramics, to develop an imaginary world centred on extroverted social relationships. In collaboration with a goldsmith, Pierre Caille also created sumptuous jewellery for women.
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