Artifices instables – Histoires de céramiques

This publication accompanies the exhibition Artifices instables, Histoires de céramiques, presented at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco – Villa Sauber and curated by Cristiano Raimondi. Featuring more than two hundred pieces, the project escapes the well-trodden art historical narratives that keep ceramics at the margins of the arts, and instead pays tribute to the medium and investigates it as a heterogeneous material capable of narrating multiple histories. Taking as its starting point the creation of the first Ceramic Art Workshop of Monaco in the second half of the nineteenth century, the book portrays some of the leading figures in the Principality's ceramic history—the Fischers, Albert Diato, and Eugène Baudin—and creates bridges and resonances with numerous artists, among them Johan Creten, Simone Fattal, George Ohr, Ron Nagle, Pablo Picasso, and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, some of whom may be distant in space and time, but nevertheless share deep connections and unexpected complicities. The book gathers more than a century of visions that this malleable medium has inspired, and mirrors ceramic artists in its aspiration to provoke a shift in perspective.