Anders Ruhwald

Born in 1974, Randers, Denmark

Works and live between London and Detroit, MI

2003-2005 Royal College of Art, London

1997-2000 The Glass and Ceramics School, Bornholm, Denmark

2007 The Sotheby's Award, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

2005 The Anni and Otto Johs. Detlefs’ award for young experimental ceramic artists

2002 Premier Prix, The 2002 Biennial, The Danish Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen

Anders Ruhwald proclaims his status as a ceramic artist. His approach is combined with a total mastery of his technical and intellectual resources and leads to the innate, deliberate choice of a highly contemporary aesthetic with no references whatsoever and a very free approach to a material whose potential and limitations he knows extremely well.

He is particularly interested in the role of objects, their social implications, the way in which we perceive and approach them, the relationships that we have with them and the way in which they can also change our modes of perception and therefore our day-to-day behaviour, especially as social beings. We have a better understanding of what Anders Ruhwald has to say. As a ceramic artist he has a privileged point of view on the matter as the ceramic artist is central to the process of creating the ceramic object.
Being a sculptor, for example, he would not have this legitimacy, as sculpture already has a status other than that of a simple object. Each project and exhibition is therefore an opportunity for him to go a step further in his thinking about this issue, which is at the heart of our relationship with our everyday environment and the people that live in it. These works sometimes suggest a function, and sometimes, on the contrary, none can really be identified. Are they simple, utilitarian objects, decorative objects or even sculptures?

In provoking such ambiguities and questions, Anders Ruhwald invites us to think about the shifts in status and semantic shifts that occur when our perception of human production is disturbed, deliberately or not. It seems that, in Anders Ruhwald’s eyes, the role of the creator of forms, here the ceramic artist, is not just to reveal forms of behaviour, but also to change them and even lead to the creation of new ones.

Yves Peltier