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Studio Visit with Ceramic Artist Jenny Hata Blumenfield | Christie’s

Los Angeles-based mixed-media ceramic artist Jenny Hata Blumenfield helps us reconsider the place of ceramics and pottery in contemporary art. ‘I see clay as having the widest range of expression,’ she explains. ‘By working with it the way that I do, I hope that steadily people will start to receive this idea of ceramics or clay as something beyond just functional.’

Blumenfield incorporates Lucite, an acrylic resin, into some of her works. In this short film, she describes transforming a two-dimensional drawing into a three-dimensional sculpture, which truly comes into its own when taken outside.

One of the most striking aspects of her process is her embrace of division, dissection and separation.
‘Being half-Japanese and half-American, I always felt stuck between two cultural identities,’ she explains. ‘I’m these two halves that really can’t seem to connect — I just exist in the in-between.’

But there is a second duality at play here, too. ‘I just would love to cut everything in half or into quarters just so that I can continue to break down this idea that ceramics can only be functional and can only be used in a day-to-day setting.’

‘That allows me to really incorporate other materials — Lucite, wood, paper, photographs — because it takes away the formalism of the vessel itself, and allows me to get experimental.’

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Picasso Ceramics from our Decorative Arts and Design Auction

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Decorative Arts and Design
June 8 – 13, 2019

A Haniwa Model of a Horse from 6th-Century Japan

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This haniwa clay model of a horse from 6th-century Japan would have been buried in a tomb on ‘a very grand scale’, explains Japanese Art specialist Mark Hinton.

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The decoration and detailing suggest it would have been made for a ‘very high-ranking person’, with tombs for such people often being ‘similar in size to a football pitch’.

Haniwa of armoured warriors and horses of the 5th and 6th century A.D. indicate the military power of the ancestors of the imperial line, and show that the horse must have played a major role in the unification struggles and the rise of the Yamato clan.

Although archaeology tells us that there were wild horses in Japan long before the Kofun period when this was made, it is believed that they had never previously been domesticated. The contents of tombs attest that horses and riding accoutrements were brought to Japan from China and Korea around the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century.

‘I think it is a very imposing and rather haunting creature,’ says Hinton of this impressive highlight from the Art of Japan sale on 8 December in London. ‘It gives us an insight into an extraordinary period in the pre-history of Japan.’

An Introduction to Greek Vases | Christie’s

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International Head of Antiquities G. Max Bernheimer surveys some magnificent Greek vases.

For a civilisation that disappeared 2,000 years ago, the ancient Greeks left a great deal behind: philosophy, democracy, poetry, architecture, and an extensive corpus of vases, which comprise a large part of the archaeological record.

Their enduring popularity is reflected in the breadth of their influence on contemporary art — as seen in the pottery of Grayson Perry and Picasso, and in the paintings of de Chirico and Jonas Wood.