Bag Sculpture No10, 2016
CLAY Ceramic Museum presents its largest exhibition to date featuring the artist Nils Erik Gjerdevik (1962–2016), focusing on his original ceramic works.
The exhibition Spaces of Possibilities presents Gjerdevik’s experimental work, in which he sculpturally explores the space-creating qualities of the borderland between utopia and dystopia – in an innovative idiom where space can collapse, but also open to new worlds. Gjerdevik often worked with installations and across multiple media, such as painting, paper and ceramics. However, his ceramic sculptures possess a special energy and depth that CLAY wishes to highlight. In these works, Gjerdevik is both exploratory and playful, combining the spontaneous with the carefully planned. Here, he challenges the laws of physics while demonstrating a deep understanding of the history of art and architecture.
He was an artist who insisted on exploring the spatial possibilities of form and colour in clay - in a complex and playful idiom that still speaks directly to our time, says exhibition curator Anders Kolt Rasmussen.
The exhibition presents more than 50 works and gives the audience a rare insight into Gjerdevik’s artistic world, where humour, seriousness, poetry and precision meet.
With Nils Erik Gjerdevik – Spaces of Possibilities, CLAY focuses on Gjerdevik’s renewal of the sculptural language of ceramics and on an artist who reflects our contemporary search for new ways of thinking and shaping the world.
The exhibition runs until May 31, 2026.
