EDMUND DE WAAL

The exhibition is the internationally acclaimed artist and writer’s first with Gagosian in New York ina decade and follows elective affinities at the Frick Collection, New York (2019), and The Hare withAmber Eyes at the Jewish Museum, New York (2021–22), which presented different aspects of hiswide-ranging practice.

this must be the place features wheel-thrown porcelain vessels, both black and white, presented inwall-mounted vitrines. De Waal juxtaposes the cylindrical vessels and bowls with fine porcelaintiles, blocks of steel, silver, and stone, some of which are inscribed with handwritten text. In theircompositions and spacing, these arrangements recall books on a shelf, stanzas of poems, or the notesand rests of musical notation.

De Waal relates: “For the last two years my studio has been full of silver, steel, marble, andporcelain. This new body of work is about place—where things come from, where they belong, whatwe remember and pass on. The materials echo places. I use porcelain clay from Limoges but turnit black with oxides and inscribe it with remembered poetry. I use marble from Kilkenny and pushfolded sheets of silver into crevices like prayers into a wall. The work is full of fragments, scraps ofsilver on the rims of bowls, poems, music, echoes of people that matter to me and the places wherethey lived. These sculptures are new places.”

In this must be the place, de Waal engages with materiality, memory, and diaspora. Titled withallusions to verses by John Milton and Wallace Stevens, the vertical black vitrines contain darkporcelain vessels placed alongside tiles and blocks of silver, marble, and Cor-Ten steel. Dedicatedto Emily Dickinson, six Letters to Amherst works (2023) include compositions in primarily unglazedporcelain, gold leaf, and alabaster arrayed within horizontal white vitrines.

De Waal has also made new stone benches carved from Kilkenny marble, a fine-grained sedimentaryrock. These monolithic benches incorporate silver, inscribed, folded like sheets of paper, andembedded in the surface of the benches, echoing the ritual placement of written prayers intoJerusalem’s Western Wall.

this must be the place is complemented by the presentation of to light, and then return— at Gagosian’sgallery at 976 Madison Avenue, New York, from September 14 to October 28, 2023. This exhibitionfeatures sculptures by de Waal and platinum prints and tintypes by Sally Mann that each artistcreated in response to the other’s work.

Edmund de Waal was born in 1964 in Nottingham, England, and lives and works in London. Publiccollections include the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, England;Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, England; Victoria & Albert Museum, London;Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany; Jewish Museum, Berlin;Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Exhibitions include On White: Porcelain Stories from the Fitzwilliam, Fitzwilliam Museum, University ofCambridge, England (2013–14); white: a project by Edmund de Waal, Royal Academy of Arts, London(2015–16); During the Night, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2016–17); white island, Museu d’ArtContemporani d’Eivissa, Ibiza, Spain (2018); –one way or other–, Schindler House, Los Angeles(2018–19); elective affinities, Frick Collection, New York (2019); psalm, Museo Ebraico and AteneoVeneto, Venice (2019); Lettres à Camondo, Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris (2021–22); and TheHare with Amber Eyes, Jewish Museum, New York (2021–22).

De Waal is also renowned for his family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), which won theRSL Ondaatje Prize and the Costa Biography Award, among others, and has been translated intoover thirty languages. Other titles include Bernard Leach (1997), The White Road (2015), and Lettersto Camondo (2021). In 2015, de Waal was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction

by Yale University. In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and made aCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for Services to the Arts. He will receive theIsamu Noguchi Award on September 12, 2023, together with Theaster Gates and Hanya Yanagihara.