KeramiK

About

Petra Bittl
Despite nearly becoming a painter, Petra ended up studying at the State Vocational School For Ceramics, Landshut and State Technical College for Ceramic Design, Höhr-Grenzhausen. Since 2003 she has been working in her own studio in Bonn developing her distinct style heavily informed by painting and sketching. She combines stoneware and porcelain clays and creates a unique surface structure with painting, scratching, porcelain inlays and slip decoration in simple line and circle forms but creating an intricate relief. Her work has been widely awarded and exhibited all over the world.

Gabi Ehrminger
Gabi established her first studio in 1984. Since then she has refined her own specific technique for making double-walled pieces in white or red clay: after being thrown on the wheel they are patiently polished with smooth stones before being wood fired. Gabi combines pure, simple shapes that are smooth and bright and touched by the lively traces of fire which different wood firings impart to her ceramic pieces.

Markus Klausmann
Markus works in Waldkirch, in the Black Forest in the South of Germany; following a visit to Japan in 1995, he has concentrated on extending Asian glaze and wood firing techniques. Always concerned with the utility of his work, he uses a specially constructed wood-fired kiln to fire his pots to 1260°C, making them impermeable to all liquids. The pots themselves are glazed with Shino sprayed in different thicknesses for different colour effects, and then decorated with wood ash and an oxblood copper glaze. Straw is sometimes mixed in for texture.

Martin Möhwald
After an apprenticeship with Hedwig Bollhagen in Marwitz, Martin based himself in Halle, a battered industrial town whose personality seems to carries through through to his work: frayed, battered, damaged and repaired. Incorporating letters, calligraphy, and pattern sequences,especially featuring animals, these shattered objects resemble museum pieces – palimpsests – relics of the taste of lost societies that stand out in an age of flawless manufacture; broken yet so thoroughly repaired that they still withstand daily use.

Fritz Rossmann
Based in Höhr-Grenzhausen, just outside Koblenz, Fritz works mainly in porcelain using celadon glazes. He uses engobe slip to emphasise certain features; iron is absorbed into the glaze where the two overlap causing it to take on a slightly darker shade. Recently he has moved more into using black, a sharp contrast to his long established use of blue celadon. Most of his work is thrown, with some being slab-built. Since 1992 he has been a member of the ceramic collective Keramikgruppe Grenzhausen, a much respected group of studio potters, and he has work in a range of international museums.

Christiane Wilhelm
Christiane established her own studio in Munich in 1988 after three years of apprenticeship and three of study from 1973 to 1979. Based on classical forms, the calmness of Christiane’s delicate round thrown vessels and largely monochrome colour schemes give themselves up in incredible tactile detail – gloss and matt surfaces, incisions and scoring, paint and porcelain scraps applied to the stoneware.