This special exhibition presents ninety contemporary ceramic works with outstanding formativeness and painterly expression selected from the collection of Icheon World Ceramic Center.
Works by Peter Voulkos, dubbed “the Jackson Pollock of ceramics’, and Rudy Autio, dubbed “the Henri Matisse of ceramics”, and other world renowned ceramic artists are on display.

Painting into Ceramics is a special exhibition of selected works from the collection of Icheon World Ceramic Center that show the painterly nature of contemporary ceramics.
Ceramic art is a genre of fine art that freely crosses the three-dimensional and two-dimensional realms with clay as the primary medium. Ceramic works, therefore, connote both sculptural and painterly elements for aesthetic appreciation. Considering the texture of the basic material clay, the diverse means of decoration, and the final firing process, the painterly characteristics revealed on the surface of a pot are one of the most important aesthetic manifestations inherent to ceramics.
Ceramic art can be understood as three-dimensional painting.

The exhibition is divided into three sections and is arranged in a way that permits viewers to truly appreciate the refined painterly expression and artistic achievement.
The exhibition will also show how the unique and diverse painterly features of ceramic art developed, including the texture of clay and the deep subtle colors created in the firing process, in addition to the three-dimensional spatial sense and formative aesthetics of ceramic art.
We hope that viewers will experience the creative points of view to recognize reality through works that depict aspects of our lives as well as natural scenery and the individual artists’ concepts of the times.

section 1. Everyday Life in Ceramics

In this section are works in which artists incorporated their own points of view and imaginations into clay, telling us many different stories about our lives and sensibilities. By capturing numerous aspects of our everyday lives, the artists expressed common subjects ingeniously on ceramics, including moments of history, society, family, identity of individuals; emotions of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure; and our world of imagination.

section 2. Natural Scenery in Ceramics

Works that depict natural scenery with clay are shown. As in landscape painting, the artists recomposed their sensibilities of nature with the texture and colors of ceramics.

section 3. Abstract Expression in Ceramics

Ceramic sculptures through which artists expressed their emotions and ideas in abstract forms such as dots, lines, shapes, planes, and colors rather than in specific forms are presented, from works in achromatic tones or in single colors to abstract expressionist ceramics, ceramics with abstract paintings in geometric forms that impart intelligent and cold feeling, to ceramics with abstract paintings that impart passionate feeling through liberal strokes and rhythmic movement.