Exquisite Rupture

June 2022 — NEW YORK CITY— We’re thrilled to announce a retrospective exhibition covering the past decade of Aneta Regel’s work. Fresh off of the heels of her entry into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s formidable collection, this exhibition explores just what makes the London-based sculptor’s work so subversive.

Her signature use of color, form, and texture is what gives her work such visual gravitas. It’s an approach to sculpting she developed over many years, relying on an her own expert understanding of slips and glazes, as well as fired porcelain’s peculiar reaction to the inclusion of foreign bodies, to hone her technique.

It’s this understanding of clay, and cultural context surrounding fine porcelain, that has allowed Regel to subvert and re-invent the idea of a ‘desirable clay object,’ allowing us to analyze porcelain’s history as a luxury good, an illustrious signifier of refinement, and sculptural medium.

While we imagine fine clay objects to be smooth and un-included, Regel fills hers with gravel, grit, and hand-ground stones— anything from volcanic rock to granite is fair game. While we imagine porcelain pottery to be painted in a fine hand and gilded in gold, Regel douses her work in dazzling, resplendent tones; as she lets her glaze drip, she conjures a luminous, technicolor geography of shapes that transcends the divide between sculpture and vessel.

Regel has mastered the art of the fissure, transforming the cracked vessel from an object of derision on into an object of desire. Allowing stone to burst fourth from her naturalistic, sculptural forms she tears a hole in preconception. Thus, over the course of her celebrated career, she has turned the cracked pot into a radical sculptural form that subverts fragility and vulgarity to rapturous joy.