pigott & morandi

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott
A Survey 1955–2005
4 November 2005 to 19 March 2006

now showing at the NGV

This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of ceramic works by Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Australia’s most acclaimed potter. The exhibition spans the fifty years of her career to date, from the functional wares she produced through the 1960s and 1970s, through to the still-life groups of porcelain vessels that she developed in the 1980s and for which she is internationally renowned. The exhibition can be seen in two of the galleries usually reserved for the works of Asian art, in order to reflect the fundamental influence of the Kent Collection of Chinese ceramics on Hanssen Pigott’s decision to become a potter.

-----------------------------------
at phillip bacon
extract
images

----------------------------------
galerie besson

2000

2004
Hanssen Piggott’s well established debt to Morandi implies a meditative approach, but while these pots are essentially contemplative, her configurations also distil and abstract the rhythmic motion of household things – careful placements that suggest studied randomness as well as quiet poise. Some congregate as they might on a kitchen surface.

As Karen Wilkin has written of the hybrid nature of Morandi’s own workspace: “there is nothing remarkable about any of it. Quite the contrary, as attested by the sheer multiplicity of the stacks of crockery, the rows of bottles, the clusters of generic vases and all the seemingly uncountable objects that covered the shelves and tables of [the] overpoweringly cluttered monastic studio”.

Hanssen Pigott, like Morandi, selects from this kind of multitude, gives it an order. She plays with numerous combinations of form and glaze (varied white, ochres, blues) and with vertical or longer, more horizontal formations.
----------------------------
at the tate

Caravan is the first major touring exhibition by this Australian artist in the UK. Gwyn Hanssen Pigott is one of Australia's most successful ceramic artists, with a career spanning over forty years. She is renowned for the abstract simplicity of her meditative, off-white porcelain pots, arranged in close groupings; which can be seen both as metaphors and as ordinary everyday objects.

-----------------------

With a career spanning five decades, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott now has an international reputation. The artist has made a long study of historical pottery, both Asian and European, and is well practised in the traditions of wood-fired ceramics.

Since 1988, Hanssen Pigott, inspired by the paintings of the Italian twentieth-century artist Georgio Morandi, has formed groups of her pots into still-life arrangements.

In these works, the profiles, volumes and materials of the vessels are endowed with special significance, even a metaphysical dimension.

--------------------------------------

museo morandi