Throughout his career, Ipsen has explored and experimented with myriad themes emphasizing form and composition, as well as spatial context. Primarily employing hand-built circular, elliptical, and biomorphic shapes, his work reveals a methodical approach that is both complex and refined in structure. His Ellipse sculptures are accented with interwoven strands of PVC, resulting in an optical expression of surging movement within the object. The monochromatic Organic pieces are created intuitively—a series of idiosyncratic undulating forms.

Steen Ipsen, a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy and the Kolding School of Design, headed the academy's ceramics and glass department for several years. Thanks to his inclusion in major international collections, in particular at the MAD Museum in Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, his work is widely known throughout the world.

Arabia's ceramics factory closed in 2016, but ceramic art continues to be made in the premises of the former Arabia art department. The dozen or so artists of the Arabia Art Department Association cherish traditions and brilliantly renew ceramic art in their studios.

At the beginning of July, the premises of the Arabia Art Department Association are quiet. Of the ten artists, Marianne Huotari, Sakari Kannosto and Kati Tuominen-Niittylä are busy with work and are preparing their works for the association's 20th anniversary exhibition.

The art department association is located on the eighth floor of the former Arabia factory, and in its corridors you can get a glimpse of what goes on behind the green painted doors of the studio rooms.

On Tuesday, Design Miami made an auspicious debut, not only owing to its ne-plus-ultra roster—many of the galleries showing in their hometown—but also to its extraordinary venue: the Hôtel de Maisons, an 18th-century mansion near the Musée d’Orsay that Karl Lagerfeld called home for roughly two decades (last month, it drew attention as the location for the Marni show).

Opening October 14 at Scandinavia House, Narrative Threads: Works by Eight Nordic Artists presents multi-media artwork by Nordic artists, each distinguished by their innovative use of natural, synthetic, and digital materials. Exploring Nordic craft traditions through a contemporary lens, the works in the exhibition engage with material experimentation, and digital technology. Textile design, ceramics, stitching, painting, audio recording, and assemblage unleash diverse narrative expressions and perspectives. The exhibition will feature the work of eight internationally celebrated artists: Margrethe Aanestad (Norway), Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter (Iceland), Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson (Iceland), Hildur Bjarnadóttir (Iceland), Astrid Krogh (Denmark), Heidi Hankaniemi (Finland), Marianne Huotari (Finland), and Kristina Riska (Finland). The works in the exhibition explore personal histories and intergenerational discourse, while influenced by ages-old handicraft techniques and cultural traditions.

Anoschkin’s exuberant aesthetic springs from an amalgam of sources, melding the languages of contemporary folk art, pop culture, and the toy industry. The artist’s naïve renderings of hybrid animals are conjured from her own imagination and personal experiences. These animated works are strikingly fresh in their playfulness, yet they belie deeper qualities confronting issues around otherness and the ways in which “different” beings live in the world.

Anoschkin creates spirited sculptures from wood and ceramics, with a strikingly personal touch. The successful Finnish artist's second New York exhibition opens in September at HB381 gallery.

The Arabia Art Department Society's 20th anniversary show Northern Latitude 60.20890 opens at the Iittala & Arabia Design Center on September 14, 2023 and will be on view through January 28, 2024. The exhibition of Finnish contemporary ceramics is curated by New York-based gallerists Juliet Burrows and Kim Hostler. It is accompanied by a catalog, Arabia Art Department Society: 20 Years, featuring an essay by Burrows. 

Jasmin Anoschkin creates her sculptures entirely by her own hand, whether she is carving wood with a chainsaw or molding clay. Eschewing attempts at technical perfection, she does not hide evidence of these physical processes, embracing uneven surfaces or unexpected glaze effects in her ceramic works. Her whimsical yet poignant characters and the dreamlike world they inhabit suggest an alternative to the rigid and narrow societal standards of what is valued and accepted. 

New sculptures by Jasmin Anoschkin are on view at the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku, Finland through September 17, in the exhibition "Hei tyypit!”

"Hei tyypit!” highlights contemporary Finnish sculpture, featuring works by Anoschkin, Mia Hamari, Johanna Havimäki, Kim Jotuni, Hanna Makkonen, and Tiia Matikainen.

Utilizing clay, wood, and glass in a versatile manner, Anoschkin creates artworks whose roughly hewn shapes seem to have sprung directly from a child’s vivid imagination; her characters are unashamedly themselves. 

Bjørn Friborg is a Danish glass artist based in Denmark. Friborg challenges traditional methods of glass-making with a physically demanding approach that stretches the limits of both the material and technique.

In conversation with STIR, the Danish furniture designer and artist explains that he is a “hands-on artist, deeply involved in the tangible material he is exploring as well as in the intellectual perspectives of a given project.” Resistance is a key focal point for Jørgensen, who is thrilled when materials put up a fight, and he has to grapple and tussle with them in order to “bring out their core.” The artist is committed to locating the very essence of the thing he works with, and extracting the form, however challenging that task may be. His process is one that is very personal to him, and often holds him enraptured for the duration of a project. It takes him to a meditative state, where there is little else save the artist, his material and the sculpture practice that binds them together.

Meer is an innovative information channel providing a constant stream of updates, stories and articles written in six different languages

The artists of the Arabia Art Department Society are featured in the new exhibition “Atelier Life,” on view at the Hvitträsk Museum in Finland through September.

The new issue of Acne Paper is created around the idea of a house with a fantasy collection of furniture, art and objects. To furnish our imaginary house we have been searching through time and place for the unique: from the most interesting pieces by contemporary designers, to iconic items in the history of decorative arts, from surreal objets d’art, to ancient antiques and invaluable masterworks.

Please join us in the UrbanGlass Studio on June 21 for an engaging glassblowing demonstration on the eve of Friborg's solo exhibition.

Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl is a ceramic artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has worked with a myriad of spatial themes and ornaments that frequently reoccur in his formal vocabulary, and which emerge through a methodical, gradual and experimental serial process. Notably, the knot as a shape has been a leitmotif offering possibilities for various sinuous rhythmic cadences and abstract narratives. The hand built architectonic works appear as ‘spatial drawings’–solid, twisting and turning through space. Kaldahl’s interest also lies in the potential of the object to make a direct emotional impact on the viewer. The motif is always clear in its simplicity and easily decoded while remaining open to interpretations.

Join us for a virtual talk with Glenn Adamson and Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl, on the eve of Kaldahl's solo exhibition Probing the Floor, Sniffing the Air.

HB381 is thrilled to partner with Greenwich House Pottery in hosting a pop-up exhibition and sale to raise funds for the organization's Shape the Future Capital Campaign. The exhibition will be comprised of pieces from the Pottery’s Collection and art donated by patrons as well as contemporary makers, including work by Toshiko Takaezu, Roberto Lugo, Kathy Butterly, Nicole Cherubini, Robert Sperry, Linda Lopez, Peter Lane, and others.

Greenwich House Pottery is a historic ceramics studio serving the New York community for over a century. The Shape the Future building project and supporting campaign was launched to address urgently needed upgrades and modernizations to the historic 95-year-old facility, to ensure that the studio remains a vital resource for ceramic artists and enthusiasts for generations to come. For more than a century, Greenwich House Pottery has advanced ceramic arts, culture, and creativity through classes taught by highly skilled teaching artists, exhibitions, and artist residencies. 

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."