Ceramics and Watercolors by Santiago Calatrava

Saturday, 22 October 2005 10:51

NEW YORK.-A series of new ceramic artworks by the Spanish-born architect, engineer and artist Santiago Calatrava, created at a workshop near his native Valencia, will be the focus of an exhibition at New York City’s Queen Sofía Spanish Institute. Some thirty richly decorated vases and bowls will be featured in the exhibition Clay and Paint: Ceramics and Watercolors by Santiago Calatrava. Made by traditional pottery-wheel techniques in the town of Manises, which has an uninterrupted history of ceramics that dates back 2,000 years, the works have forms that were newly designed by Calatrava and are glazed with the natural, iron oxide pigments that have been used in the region since before Roman times. The decorations—images of human figures, bulls and horses—were either incised into the glaze by Calatrava or painted by him onto the surface. Ceramic bas relief sculptures on the theme of music and dance, each measuring approximately 8 feet wide by 4 feet high, are also included in the exhibition. The installation will be rounded out by a selection of Calatrava’s watercolors of human figures, bulls and horses. Concurent with this exhibition, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture into Architecture , an exhibition of Calatrava’s sculpture, drawings and architectural models. Calatrava has always been familiar with the pottery-making heritage of Valencia and has often used irregularly shaped ceramic tiles as a finishing surface of his buildings. But he did not turn his hand to the art of ceramics until a few years ago, in Tuscany, when he designed and decorated his first vases in Montelupo Fiorentino—another ancient Mediterranean center for pottery, and a sister city of Manises. Calatrava’s ceramics are now becoming a significant feature of his architecture. His recent work in Manises includes two mural-size bas relief sculptures, composed of ceramic plates measuring 2 feet square, which he has designed for the Valencia Opera, the last major building in his vast City of Arts and Sciences complex. The murals, which will be installed in the Opera’s main auditorium and in the restaurant, measure 110 feet long and 85 feet long and are 12 feet high and feature decorations of bulls and of dancers. According to Calatrava, “Ceramics is a new discovery for me. I believe the shapes of some of the vases are real inventions, like small works of architecture. And the decoration demands a beautiful level of concentration. You draw in an almost calligraphic way, the way an engraver works on a metal plate—and the most exciting thing is that you can’t make any mistake. You can’t change anything. “It is a real challenge to make something new and modern with an ancestral technique that has survived for 2,000 years. It’s such a primitive, elemental way to draw, and yet the greatest of the modern masters, Picasso and Matisse, chose it as one of their means of _expression. So there is a lot to confront in making these works—but there is something very refreshing about doing them, too. It is wonderful to be around the people of Manises." Born in Benimamet, near Valencia, Santiago Calatrava is known internationally for his bridges, transportation projects, large-scale urban interventions (such as the City of Arts and Sciences and the Athens Olympic Sports Complex) and major buildings. Prominent among the latter are the expansion of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Tenerife Auditorium in the Canary Islands, HSB Turning Torso in Malmö, Sweden, and the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York City. Calatrava has been the recipient of the American Institute of Architects 2005 Gold Medal—the highest honor conferred by the AIA—and in November 2004 he received the Gold Medal of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute."

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