Michael Geertsen - Utopia tur/retur
Designmuseum Danmark
22 March - 11 June 2023
Danish ceramic artist Michael Geertsen (b. 1966) has explored Norwegian ceramic designer Nora Gulbrandsen’s (1894–1978) pattern vocabulary.
From 1927 to 1946, Gulbrandsen was art director of Porsgrund's Porcelain Factory, where she created more than 300 individual designs, often with inspiration from Art Deco and cubism and, during the interwar years, in an almost demonstratively modernist expression.
Feeling a spiritual connection to the flighty utopian ideas of the interwar period, Geertsen engaged Gulbrandsen in a dialogue about dreams and reality in design. In this process, he mixed details from Gulbrandsen’s works combined with decals that were transferred to the porcelain before firing.
In this way, he decorated 100 plates. In addition, Geertsen cast and cut up two of Gulbrandsen’s vases, still in production at Porsgrund, and combined them with his own wheel-thrown elements. The project was carried out in collaboration with Porsgrund’s Porcelain Factory and the porcelain workshop 1400o.