SOFI VAN SALTBOMMEL. GROTESQUES ET TOILETTES
From 21 April to 29 September 2019, hybrid forms created by Belgian artist Sofi van Saltbommel are invading all four corners of Keramis.
Grotesques et Toilettes (Grotesqueries and Dress) is taking over the whole of Keramis. Without being a retrospective, the exhibition presents a large selection of Sofi van Saltbommel’s work: ceramic jugs and masks, kings and jesters in all their finery, dolls and fetishes in dazzling colours…
Grotesqueries stands for ridicule and extravagance, but also the wonderful and magnificent found in hybrid and deformed ceramic figures with morphological exaggerations dreamt up by the artist. Dress represents the clothing and jewellery creations. Quite often, both are combined in the same work.
The bottle kilns are inhabited by dolls and porcelain in courtly scenes in which the artist has staged an intervention. In the contemporary gallery, a large anthropomorphic vase enters into dialogue with pieces by Johan Creten and Carmen Dionyse, while in the gallery known as the large nave, 14 ceramic masks adorned in fabric face one another.
Sofi van Saltbommel evokes the hybrid and the strange in her creations. Her work draws inspiration from the very origins of the pagan carnival: a place where people can make themselves up, metamorphose and express themselves in a strictly organised world.
To mark her appearance at Keramis, the artist has also produced two sculptures in situ that can be viewed in the small nave.
Sofi van Saltbommel’s work in the exhibition continuously oscillates between the serious and the comical, the savage and the refined.