Bouke de Vries
Netherlander Bouke de Vries trained first in design at Eindhoven and Central St Martins and worked with John Galiano, Stephen Jones and Zandra Rhodes before retraining in ceramics conservation and restoration, a skill that is integral to his recently developed artistic practice. Using reclaimed broken china, glass and pottery, often pieces that have lost a high value in their breaking, de Vries reconstructs them in fragmented or altered forms. He describes their breaking as their trauma - the most dramatic episode in the life of a ceramic object - and he explores and emphasises this point, looking to both the life and value of the broken ceramic, his own experience from Dutch 17th and 18th century still-life painting he saw growing up and to contemporary life.
Still life after Kalf
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Sculpture
23cm x 25cm x 23cm
Mixed media, 19th century roemer glass
The Roemer glass, a type of wine glass is chosen as an identical match to one used in Willem Kalf’s Still life with Lemon, Oranges and Glass of Wine. De Vries follows this to restore the exact composition, though freezing the glass seemingly in its moment of shattering and again making no attempt to preserve the perishable fruit from rotting, in reference to accounts of the heaps and of rotting fruit in 17th and 18 century still life painters studios.
£1,500
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