Athene Galiciadis’s Empty Vessels

Static, fluid, graphic, organic – pattern may be coded with language or loaded with metaphor. It can start out measured but end up unravelled. Such is the case with the work of Athene Galiciadis, whose latest collection of ‘Empty Sculptures’ (2013–ongoing) are cloaked in a mosaic of free-wheeling motifs, sketched first on paper, transferred by hand onto clay, then permitted free rein across the vessels’ unfired surfaces.

For ‘Measuring the World’, Galiciadis’s debut solo exhibition at von Bartha, Copenhagen, and her first singular presentation of ceramics, the artist speaks a patois gleaned from children’s textbooks and renaissance ornament. Motifs, the artist tells me when we meet, are abstracted from ‘very simple, rudimentary forms […] things that you find in every culture’, such as a ‘staircase in Paris or a fence in Hungary’. They become manifest in the works as colourful painted zigzags, rhomboids, swirls and chequers: each open-top, handle-less vessel is unique in both form and pattern. In Empty Sculptures (Bananas) (2022), for instance, a tessellation of yellow bananas against pink acrylic is not simply childishly playful but refreshingly unpretentious. Translucent layers of acrylic and oil have been applied in mimicry of the artist’s recent works on canvas, such as Stillleben (related revelations) (2022), with beguiling results which shift in density from sculpture to sculpture.

Within the renovated former gatehouse where von Bartha now resides, Galiciadis has placed a dozen or so vessels on two-tier, steel-and-MDF storage units that, according to the exhibition literature, replicate those in her Zurich studio. Here, however, the works shuffle back and forth within the shelving grid, some overhanging precariously. There is a degree of self-consciousness to this placement, dissociating the display from the earnestness of an archive or the randomness of an artist’s studio. I’m more drawn to the three, floor-bound works – a positioning that reveals their wobbly necklines and blank interiors. Looking back up, I lose my sense of the scale of the ceramics beyond reach and wonder if these highest-placed pieces have been skewed, just as renaissance artists would design their works according to the perspective from which they would be viewed once installed.

These ‘bodily’ pieces – hand coiled by the artist – are a world apart from Galiciadis’s formative art education in Switzerland during the early 2000s, which focused on the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand. Rather than rejecting historicism or ornamentation as prescribed by constructivist doctrine, however, Galiciadis’s works are referential in both form and pattern. In Empty Sculptures (Stairs) (2022), a giant, bead-shaped urn in dusky blue and cream recalls the crenelations of Persepolis. In Empty Sculptures (Big Black Triangles) (2023), a wobbly rotund vase nods to the chequerboard mazzocchio in Paolo Uccello’s Scenes from the Life of Noah (c.1447) at Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

A shorthand for interdependence, infinity and becoming, the concept of emptiness evoked in the series title is also, paradoxically, culturally charged. In Taoist Philosophy, for instance, the tao is like an empty vessel, used but never filled, its fullness beyond the bounds of our imaginations. It also makes me think of Honoré de Balzac’s short story The Unknown Masterpiece (1831), in which a painter toils over a picture of a young woman for so many years that she disappears from its surface altogether. Perhaps this is what the multitude of references contained in Galiciadis’s sculptures approaches: an accumulation that results in erasure. Emptied of worldly measures, they are liberated for our own interpretation. As Rem Koolhaas said in a 1989 essay for Design Book Review: ‘Where there is nothing, everything is possible.’

Athene Galiciadis’s ‘Measuring the World’ is on view at Von Bartha, Copenhagen, until 13 May

_{Main image: Athene Galiciadis, Empty Sculptures (Black and Lila Zigzag) (detail), 2023, acrylic on ceramics, 58 × 45 × 45 cm. Courtesy: the artist and von Bartha, Copenhagen and Basel}