Exhibition Details

Irene Nordli started by creating the series The Pillars for the project Afterglow, a new Nordic porcelain forum, where she, together with a group of artists from various Nordic countries, was to investigate what was left of the porcelain industry in the Nordic countries. Several works in this series are now on display at the Clay Museum in Denmark and at the Gustavsberg Porselinsmuseum in Sweden. With Mingshu Li as her assistant, she continued to create more sculptures in this series. These are now being exhibited for the first time at Format.
Irene Nordli went to the porcelain city of Jingdezhen in China for the first time in 2011. There she found copies of Greek sculptures in the art supplies shop. She continued to work on these sculptures while she was there, taking casts of the copies and making new processed versions.
The moulds she has used for the Pillars are from the world of hobby ceramics and can be used by anyone and have no high artistic value. Works that she has made based on these forms are like three-dimensional collages. The columns are deformed and crooked, and no longer in balance. The columns no longer support as they should and the forms they support are wobbly at the top. The figures are processed and put together and become more or less unrecognisable.
There has been a tradition of transferring small models of classical marble sculptures to porcelain as decoration for the home. The porcelain imitates marble and both materials have whiteness and light in them. Now we know that the Greek sculptures were once richly decorated and the colours covered the marble. Irene Nordli allows her glazes to do the same by covering the white porcelain.
Approaching classical sculpture continues to interest her. Moving between figuration and abstraction, the known and the unknown, the beautiful and the grotesque characterises her art.