ART CITIES:Beverly Hills-Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal (Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal), is best known for his large scale installations of porcelain vessels. Much of Edmund’s recent work has been concerned with ideas of collecting and collections, how objects are kept together, lost, stolen or dispersed. His work comes out of a dialogue between Minimalism, Architecture and Music, and is informed by his passion for literature.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

From simple pairs to complex multitudes of small objects, Edmund de Waal draws inspiration from many sources, including the poetry of Paul Celan and the musical compositions of John Cage. At the heart of the exhibition “Ten Thousand Things” is a series of responses to the Schindler House on Kings Road in Los Angeles. For de Waal, the Schindler House is “Improvisatory architecture”, which offered a new way of living and working, a new set of possibilities for materials, a new architecture for a new city. For the first time, de Waal combines his porcelain with steel, lead, and plaster blocks, creating a new kind of dialogue between raw materials within a sculptural framework and the architectural space that they occupy. The exhibition title derives from a longer phrase by Cage about work, endless repetition, and unfolding, a citation inspired by the Taoist metaphor of indefinite multitude that underscores Chinese modular patterns of thought. In de Waal’s work, this is borne out in sequences of thrown porcelain vessels glazed in shades of white, cream, celadon, and a newly developed palette of textured, metallic black glazes contained by various framing devices in steel and aluminum.  “Composition for three voices” is linked specifically to the story of Cage’s relationship with Rudolph and Pauline Schindler during the time that he lived with them in their idiosyncratic modern home, while “Ten thousand things, for John Cage I–XX” proposes a sequential structure with twenty open aluminum boxes containing different arrangements of pots. His latest book, “The White Road: Journey into an Obsession”, traces the historical evolution of porcelain from its origin in Jingdezhen, China, through developments in Venice, Versailles, Dresden, Cornwall, and the Cherokee Country of South Carolina.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, Duration: 14/1-18/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com