CURATOR'S COLUMN: Tristan Hoare Introduces Ensō: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg and Taizo Kuroda
Ensō is an exhibition featuring the work of two artists, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, a Dusseldorf-based artist working with photography and Taizo Kuroda, a Japanese ceramicist based outside of Tokyo. I’m delighted to announce that it will be the first exhibition in my new gallery space in Fitzrovia.
In 2009, I organised my first ever gallery show with Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. I exhibited the series Sonnenstand, a sublime group of works focusing on the relationship between light and architecture. Using her signature grid system, Ursula repeatedly photographed the east windows of hermitages on the route to Santiago de Compostella. Taken at different times of the day and during different seasons of the year, light streams through the windows turning the chapels into sundials, echoing the earth’s passage around the sun.
Six years have passed since then, the gallery has changed in that time and now represents a roster of international artists. Like Ursula, many of these artists work with photography, however my new vision for the gallery is to begin collaborating with artists working in different mediums. The combination of photography and ceramics therefore tells the story of the gallery’s origins and its continuing evolution.
The idea of exhibiting Ursula’s photographs with Taizo Kuroda came about through a chance encounter at a Japanese restaurant! I was lucky enough to be traveling in Japan when I spotted an unusual rough white porcelain plate the food was being served on. The chef explained that all the tableware was a special commission by a well-known Japanese ceramicist Taizo Kuroda. Sometime later, I visited him in his amazing studio by the sea in Izu, and although I don’t have much experience in ceramics I could recognize the undeniable quality of the work. All his pieces are handmade and often deliberately flawed. They seem to reach a level of perfection I have never come across before. Even more unexpectedly, as I got to know Kuroda and understand his practice better I began to notice connections between his work and Ursula’s. They come from artistic traditions many worlds apart but I felt that the conversation between their art works would be a fascinating one, and thus was born an exhibition.
The final phase has been to find a theme to link the artists without being too literal. Ursula doesn’t talk much about her work and Kuroda’s pots are not easy to explain (both are better experienced). I felt the Buddhist concept of Ensō, where focused repetition leads to perfection, was a good way of opening the dialogue between both artists.
Finally, after the great excitement of receiving the ceramics in London, I travelled to Munich with a small model of the gallery and during an intense weekend, Ursula and I developed an idea of how to present the show. The gallery has two rooms and we decided that the ceramics would be displayed on plinths in one room with Ursula’s work on the wall, and we would reverse the system in the second room, ceramics on shelves and photographs on consoles in the center of the room. By curating the exhibition in this way the ceramics and the photographs will be in dialogue, yet speak for themselves.
Tristan Hoare
Tristan Hoare,
6 Fitzroy Square W1T 5HJ
Tuesday - Saturday, 11am-6pm
Ensō: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg and Taizo Kuroda, 16th September – 21st October 2016
Image 1: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Ararat, 2002, silver gelatin print, 20.4 x 19.8 cm. Image © the artist, courtesy Tristan Hoare
Image 2: Taizo Kuroda, Untitled (detail), 2015, yakishime porcelain, 44 x 26.1 cm. Image © the artist, courtesy Tristan Hoare
