Michael Geertsen and John Souter: Spring Dance

The Jason Jacques Gallery announces the opening of Spring Dance, a joint-exhibition featuring new work of Michael Geertsen and John Souter. Each artist expands the limits of the ceramic medium and the preconceptions and connotative biases with which it is viewed.

Michael Geertsen, a Danish sculptor, is known through his work’s interrogation of the cultural and artistic places that ceramic inhabits, as well as its position in the future. His work is an assemblage of thrown, cut, and rearranged forms that are glazed in striking, bright colors, and placed in exacting positions. They exist in a world between still life and sculpture, the cusp between imagined utility and brokenness. Geertsen inverts all of the aspects of a ceramic object that seem to signify functionality— a rim, a leg, a handle— and in doing so reminds the viewer both of the medium’s origins in necessity and its boundless potential.

John Souter, an American visual artist working in Philadelphia, uses mixed-media, rich texture, and vibrant hues in his work to push past notions of material purity and to present ceramic as a versatile material in dialogue with other mediums. Beyond the formal qualities of his abstract-figurations, Souter’s works question not only the boundaries of clay but of sculpture itself. They stand on their own plinths and pedestals, or contain themselves within cases, blurring the boundary between the whimsy of the art object and the pragmatism of display.

Spring Dance is a part of the Jason Jacques Gallery's contemporary program and its larger dedication to showing works in its historic East Side location in ongoing dialogue between past and present.

The show will open with a reception on April 4th, 6:00-8:00pm, and remain on view through April 26th. 

RSVP HERE