Per B Sundberg's technically complex ceramics mine the realms of kitsch, upending its notions of tastelessness with intense material corruption.
Read MoreSundberg was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He studied glass and ceramics at Konstfack, Stockholm's University of Art, Crafts and Design, receiving his MFA in 1990 before he was hired by Orrefors glassworks in 1994. At the prestigious glassware maker, Sundberg innovated several new glassmaking techniques. He has also studied at the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle and Corning Museum of Glass, New York. In 2018, Sundberg collaborated with IKEA on a range of domestic homeware.
Straddling the worlds of design and fine art, Per B Sundberg's sublimation of readymade ceramics into his own darkly fantastical vision is marked by an experimental material freedom. Sundberg's parallel line of enquiry also explores technical feats of textural glazing, applied to organic globular forms.
Sundberg's work often draws its origin point from the readymade. In humorous and sometimes apocalyptic tableaux, Sundberg merges kitschy porcelain figurines sourced from defunct factories and antique shops with phantasmagorical sculptural forms.
Observerad (2011) joins a pre-made parrot with a cactus and a penis, glued to its base with a wet purple glaze. This uncomfortable mishmash of animal and human organs taps into Sundberg's broader thematic explorations around death, decay, and sex. Freebase (2011) similarly melds a porcelain baby and a bull onto a lump of free-formed stoneware with a drizzle of semen-like glaze. Sexuality and nature are condensed in his phallic mushroom works Natur (2014) and Stubbe (2013), which culminate in Explosion (2015), a nuclear mushroom cloud modelled out of knobbly grey stoneware.
The human skull is represented in various stages of corruption in Sundberg's 'Invånare' series (2014–2015), burnt or desiccating as if they were remnants of some infernal disaster. But with typically cheeky humour, many of the skulls have distinctive hairstyles, lending their otherwise grim visages some playful personalities.
Sundberg also explores ceramics and glass processes from a formal viewpoint, innovating various glass techniques and glazing methods. He began his ongoing Object With Hole series during his time as a designer at Orrefors glassworks (1994–2005), where he made vase-like forms in glass often embedded with commercial decals, a process he termed 'fabula'. His later ceramic works continue this exploration, but with an abject materiality in which the forms are subsumed by mould-like blankets of fuzzy glaze.
Sundberg's ceramics are the result of lengthy experimental processes. Glazes developed by Sundberg are layered thickly and refired as many as 15 times. His surfaces are evocative of different materials, recalling tarnished metal, earth, soot, blood, sperm, and plastic in their textural effect. In Samling / Collection (2016) and Koloni / Colony (2019), textured biomorphic blobs open to reveal collections of miniature porcelain figures, integrating Sundberg's readymade kitsch with his muscular organic growths.
Per B Sundberg has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Select solo exhibitions include Per B Sundberg, Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm (2022, 2015); His Masters Voice, Galerie NeC, Paris (2012); Per B Sundberg, Bomuldsfabriken, Arendal, Norway (2012); Per B Sundberg, Gustavsbergs Konsthall, Sweden (2011); Greatest Hits 1983–2004, Röhsska Museet, Gothenburg, Sweden (2004); and Glasdialogen, Sveriges Glasmuseum, Växjö, Sweden (2004).
Select group exhibitions include The Flames: The Age of Ceramics, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (MAM), Paris (2021); Huid & Haar, Keramiekmuseum Princessehof, Leeuwarden, Netherlands (2021); Swedish Glass, Het Glazenhuis, Lommel, Belgium (2019); Nandipha Mntambo and Per B Sundberg, Andréhn-Schiptjenko at Galerie Hervé van der Straeten, Paris (2017); Like A Prayer, Magasin III Stockholm Konsthall (2016); Suecia Contemporare, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Sweden (2015); Suecia Contemporare, Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden (2014); Ingång nästa dörr, Galleri ID, Stockholm (2013); and Otherwordly, Magasin 3, Stockholm (2013).
Sundberg's Instagram can be found here.
Peter Derksen | Ocula | 2022
