Edmund de Waal

For this exhibition, titled “Irrkunst,” Edmund de Waal took inspiration from Walter Benjamin, who spent his childhood in the same neighborhood where this gallery’s two spaces are located. Benjamin’s method of getting lost while walking and exploring cities, or looking for a system to structure his writings (without ever succeeding), is a model that de Waal embraces for his own practice as an artist.

The majority of works here are Plexiglas vitrines filled with small porcelain vessels, all made in 2016. The arrangement of similar-looking white, or occasionally black, ones clustered in tidy groups on shelves—such as in Archive or The Task of the Critic—resemble the sequence of words in a poem. The lyricism here, though, comes from the objects—their numerous minute variations in color and shape make each item unique, while shards of their broken brethren are also incorporated into the individual compositions. Some are even gilded on the splintered side, like lucky accidents.

The artist’s attraction to these simple cups lies in their abstract qualities, and though they are solid forms, they also represent absence or emptiness. While his work has a clear connection to Minimalism in terms of repetition and variations on a motif, a personal signature seems equally important. Each container suggests a history, which connects it to people or places. In some cases, this is literally true, as in My Problem with the Frankfurt School, where fragments from a Sung dynasty tea bowl are collected into a single black bowl.