This porcelain pitcher and oval shaped stoneware vase by the world-renowned Danish ceramists Bodil Manz and Trine Heegard are perfect representations of how the Danish ceramists have perfected their art over 40 years.

While there is an elemental Scandinavian simplicity to these ceramics, they are unique not only in their names. The six-sided white pitcher by Manz is decorated with black glaze and has a characteristic shape, one of Manz’s signature forms. The same can be said about Heegard’s oval vase with bluish grey glaze that is decorated with an incised, geometric relief. The vase has a raw, yet carefully created texture which is the result of the artist’s experimentation with new challenges of expression and technique including working with such things as pictures of plaster and sand-cast porcelain.

According to Oxford Ceramics it is a bit of a cliché to say that an artist has forged their own language, but in Trine Heegaard and Bodil Manz’s case this is certainly true. Manz’s pots are so receptive to shadow and light that they carry their own sense of movement, a kind of transformative inner life. The pitcher is signed by Bodil Manz and was created in the artist’s own studio in Horve that she opened in 1967. The stoneware was handmade in ‘Trine Heegaard -Former- ‘ the artist’s own workshop in Rødovre, Denmark.

SOLD

Condition: 

In great vintage condition. Wear consistent with age and use.

Dimensions: 

Vase:

5.03 in W x 6.1 in D x 5.59 in H

12.8 cm W x 15.5 cm D x 14.2 cm H

Pitcher:

3.54 in W x 2.83 in D x 3.74 in H

9 cm W x 7.2 cm D x 9.5 cm H

About the designer: 

Bodil Manz (Danish, b. 1943) is a ceramicist known for her predominant use of ultra-thin, translucent eggshell porcelain to create distinctive cylindrical forms, anchored by bold, geometric abstractions in a style evocative of Russian Suprematism.

Manz was born in Copenhagen in 1943. After graduating from the School of Arts and Craft, Copenhagen in 1965, she went on to study at the Escuela de Disneño y Artesanias in Mexico and Berkeley University in California. She established a studio with her late husband, ceramist Richard Manz, in 1967 in Horve, where she continues to live and work today.

Much in the way Morandi approached a still life or Albers the square, her engagement with the cylinder form ad infinitum is study in the master’s ability to extract sublime nuance from the seemingly quotidien. In her own words – “Focusing and concentrating on a single object such as a sphere, a square, a cylinder, a cup, fundamentally something quite ordinary, the stuff of everyday life, [seems] indeed almost banal. But during the process we discovered fresh aspects, and suddenly ‘the ordinary’ became a new experience.

Manz has had solo exhibitions in Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdamn, London and New York and in 2008 was honoured with a major retrospective exhibition at the Kunstindustrimuseet in Copenhagen. Her work is represented in public collections worldwide including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée de Sèvres, France and the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art, Gifu, Japan. In 2007 she was awarded the Grand Prize at the 4th World Ceramic Biennale, Korea. ~H.