Jakob Jørgensen was born in 1977 in Nyborg, Denmark. As his interest in large scale steel sculpture developed, he submitted a proposal to the Danish National Workshop in 2017, and was granted access to their vast metalworking facilities. He continued his exploration of the medium, building a dedicated studio tailored to working with steel pipe on the island of Bornholm in 2020. Jørgensen’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions including at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Designmuseum, Copenhagen, Denmark; and the 21st Century Museum, Kanazawa, Japan. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Finn Juhl Prize, the Bodum Design Award, and the IFDA Goldleaf Award.

From his workshop on a remote island in the Baltic Sea, the artist crafts extraordinary totems using industrial pipes. 

For the past two years, a dazzling type of alchemy has been taking place on the remote Danish island of Bornholm, a Baltic Sea stronghold that’s geographically closer to Poland and Sweden than Denmark. There, amid the rugged sylvan landscape, one of the country’s leading creatives, Jakob Jørgensen, has conjured a veritable forest of captivating totems by welding and further manipulating low-carbon steel pipes. Taking inspiration from the wooded island’s abundance of trees, the monumental works resulting from this painstaking process have now gone on view at HB381, the contemporary art gallery founded by Juliet Burrows and Kim Hostler in Tribeca.

With his first solo exhibition within the United States just around the corner, Jakob Jørgensen’s sculptural works have grown – both in scale and ambition. These latest works mark his individual practices transition from a design led studio to one that is exploring materiality and the purely sculptural. What remains from his first tubular steel piece back in 2017 through to this latest collection is Jørgensen’s inquisitive nature towards his chosen medium – heating, pushing, expanding, compressing and deforming the humble steel tube in order to create new expressions.

John Shea’s practice belongs with equal comfort to pottery, painting, sculpture, and installation art and yet—a free radical—it belongs exclusively to no one camp. Instead, the work lives confidently in a world of in-betweens. The result feels nuanced, self-nurturing, and balanced. In a world suffering from extremes and tribalism, Shea’s formalism dwells happily in the middle.

Launched last spring as an offshoot of collectible design gallery Hostler Burrows, HB381 is a dedicated space for solo artist presentations focusing primarily on contemporary Nordic sculpture and ceramics. The Tribeca gallery’s current show—Standard, Abstract—features American ceramic artist John Shea’s latest body of work. 

HB381 is the kunsthalle-style offshoot of the more established New York collectible design gallery Hostler Burrows. Since its inception last spring, HB381 has focused on showcasing interdisciplinary talents who attempt to free sculpture from limited definitions of art and design.

American talent John Shea demonstrates this philosophy with the transcendent ceramic sculptures in his “standard, abstract” solo show—on view from January 13 to February 25. His abstract sculptures are defined by intersections, where smooth geometric planes are interrupted by rough spheres. Shea’s shapes take their cues from microscopic silica crystals and the palette from Japanese painter Sanzo Wada‘s 1932 book, A Dictionary of Color Combinations.

Sakari Kannosto (Finnish, b. 1973) is a multimedia artist working in Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa Finland, with a primary focus on ceramic sculptures and large-scale installations. His fantastical and figurative creatures are inspired by fables, Greek mythology, and Finnish folklore. As he sculpts part human, part mermaid, part animal beings, he references the Finnish myth that animals can shape shift, traveling between worlds as protectors. Imbued with whimsy and humor, Kannosto’s work is also underscored by a deep environmental consciousness.

In spring 2022, the gallery debuted its third location in TribeCa, called HB381. The new Manhattan space is exclusively devoted to contemporary work and solo exhibitions, with primary focus on sculpture and ceramics by female artists including Kristina Riska, one of Scandinavia’s foremost contemporary ceramicists, and the Helsinki-based artist Marianne Huotari, a finalist in the 2022 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. Both new spaces grew organically: “The impetus was simply to give the artists more exposure,” says Burrows.

Kristina Riska’s sculptures are deceptively simple. From across the room the large, undulating vessel forms beckon the viewer with familiarity. As you approach you feel a resonance with your own body. If we think of ourselves as part of the earth, there is a real connection between our bodies and these person sized vessels. We are drawn forward as we recognize echoes of our own form. Now from an intimate distance, closer inspection yields the truth: they are complex studies of life on the micro and macro levels, containing the history of humanity and biological life itself in physical form. They are everything all at once.

In the world of design, Kyösti Kakkonen's collection can hardly be matched. The Finnish collector has a remarkable career behind him, during which he managed to amass over 10,000 pieces of the finest ceramic and glass design spanning over a century.

Opening on 10th November 2022, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art unveils its largest project to date: a new 1000m² exhibition space dedicated to Collection Kakkonen. Bridging the gap between art and design, Collection Kakkonen has been brought together over the course of 35 years by prominent businessman and collector Kyösti Kakkonen, subsequently gaining recognition as the most significant collection of unique and limited-edition Finnish glass and ceramics in the world.

Is there a common aesthetic when it comes to Nordic porcelain? That’s the question under the spotlight in the AfterGlow exhibition, which brings together 13 contemporary ceramicists working in the Nordic countries. The artists were invited to look at the history of the porcelain industry from an artistic perspective, and to create new interpretations of the design tradition.

Though Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood is easily accessible, full of artist lofts, and synonymous with Robert De Niro’s famous film festival, its gallery scene has long been overshadowed by those of SoHo and Chelsea. Yet over the past decade, thanks to its unique architecture and comparatively low real estate prices, Tribeca has become a leading area for emerging and established galleries to plant their roots.

HB381 is pleased to announce Children of the Flood, an exhibition of new work by Sakari Kannosto (Finnish, b. 1973). This is Kannosto’s first solo presentation in the United States and marks the debut of a suite of nearly thirty figurative sculptures in stoneware.

Untitled Art will have more than 140 exhibitors at its upcoming edition in Miami Beach later this year. The fair will run November 29 to December 3, with a VIP preview on November 28, on the sands of Miami Beach (near Ocean Drive and 12th Street).

Not to brag or anything but we figure that we’ve seen at least 80 – 100,000 artworks or images of artworks in our lifetime. And then we discovered contemporary ceramics.

The fair returns to the sands of Miami Beach for its most international show to date, focusing on collaboration across the local and global art community. HB381's solo booth will feature Danish artist Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen (b. 1987).

HB381 presents Children of the Flood, an exhibition of new work by Sakari Kannosto (Finnish, b. 1973). This is Kannosto’s first solo presentation in the United States and marks the debut of a suite of nearly thirty figurative sculptures in stoneware.

Sakari Kannosto: Children of the Flood (September 9 – October 21, 2022) is a wildly inventive imagining of a world consumed and ruled by water, where humans adapt and evolve to live with the preexisting marine life.

HB381 is pleased to announce Children of the Flood, an exhibition of new work by Sakari Kannosto (Finnish, b. 1973). This is Kannosto’s first solo presentation in the United States and marks the debut of a suite of nearly thirty figurative sculptures in stoneware. The artist will be present for an opening reception on September 9th, from 5 to 8 pm.

Dating back to the Vikings, ryijy is a distinctly Finnish textile tradition that produces thick, high-pile tapestries and rugs. The heavily patterned works, which have shifted from functional to decorative, are made by hand-knotting wool and layering the yarn into lush, textured motifs.

HB381 is pleased to announce their summer exhibition, a group show of three Nordic artists emphasizing the parallels between intensive hand crafts, traditional textile techniques, and ceramics. The show will run until August 19th at the gallery’s New York location in Tribeca. 

HB381 in New York, the new gallery offshoot of Hostler Burrows, is currently hosting Selected Works by Veera Kulju, Marianne Huotari and Hanne G. The summer group show brings together three Nordic artist-makers who transpose craft techniques between the mediums of textiles and ceramics. 

In this exhibition, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Danish ceramicists have embarked upon the Nordic porcelain tradition. The works in the exhibition have been created during the past three years by 13 artists in residences at Nordic porcelain factories and workshops.

HB381 is thrilled to announce that Marianne Huotari, currently featured in our Summer Group Show, was shortlisted for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. Her work, Ananasakäämä, is on view at the The Seoul Museum of Craft Art (SeMoCA) through July 30th as part of a special exhibition honoring this year's finalists. 

Pontoppidan Pedersen lives and works on a farm in the remote countryside of Denmark. Hers is an intensely personal and physical creative process, driven by intuition and the ability to embrace discomfort—to rest in the fear of not knowing what may result as she builds—transferring her body’s energy through her fingertips directly into the clay. 

HAVING ESTABLISHED ITSELF as New York’s leading purveyor of historical and contemporary Scandinavian design, Hostler Burrows has been a mainstay of the city’s ever-evolving gallery scene since 1998. Extolling the virtues of craftsmanship, experimentation and material integrity, the gallery – founded and run by Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows – has fostered a strong roster of international designers. 

"Lately I've been thinking about how to sculpt in a feminist way," says the Danish artist Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen, who has been mining the work of scholar Donna J. Haraway for inspiration. "I'm drawn to her way of playing around with new words, of looking at things and fabulating."