For Ceramic Brussels 2026, we present five distinguished Danish artists whose practices have shaped the Danish ceramic scene and helped propel it forward. As pioneering figures, they each bring a refined mastery of material and form, showing ceramics at its most intentional and expressive. Their works highlight clay as a powerful artistic language – bold, poetic and unmistakably contemporary.For Ceramic Brussels 2026, we present five distinguished Danish artists whose practices have shaped the Danish ceramic scene and helped propel it forward. As pioneering figures, they each bring a refined mastery of material and form, showing ceramics at its most intentional and expressive. Their works highlight clay as a powerful artistic language – bold, poetic and unmistakably contemporary.
Karen Bennicke (b.1943, DK)
Karen Bennicke’s primary source of inspiration is architecture. This perspective lends her works a strong spatial character, with light and shadow as key actors in a sort of intuitive mathematical construction of thematically connected serial sculptures. She operates in a field in between something distinct and recognisable and something vaguely defined emerging in a space with harmonious as well as chaotic aspects. With this, she attempts to suspend the distinction between the logical and tangible universe of form that we are familiar with from our daily lives and a realm that is illogical, unfamiliar and absurd.
Gitte Jungersen (b.1967, DK)
Gitte Jungersen’s ceramic objects appear to be frozen on the edge between chaos and control, capturing a single moment in an intense process. The pieces evoke dual associations: in addition to the raw and chaotic forces of nature, they also imply a synthetic artificiality in both colour and texture. They trigger a sense of something uncontrollable and catastrophic, despite the beautiful and alluring sensory appeal of their ceramic materiality.
Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl (b.1954, DK)
Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl’s ceramic works are basically non-narrative but strongly emphasise the capacity of the form itself to transfer emotional content directly to the viewer. Out of numerous pieces of cut clay tubes, he builds parts which are later assembled into larger structures that freely make their way through space as pure sculptural movements – like a captured account of the moment.
Turi Heisselberg Pedersen (b.1965, DK)
Turi Heisselberg Pedersen’s work often involves capturing observations and conditions in nature, such as small incidents or events like a bud bursting open, a landslide or the aftermath of human intervention. The works appear as abstractions, patterns and rhythmic sequences that mimic nature’s idiom through a stylised expression in an attempt to open our eyes to the poetry, humour, cruelty and beauty in nature that are often overlooked.
Bente Skjøttgaard (b.1961, DK)
Bente Skjøttgaard challenges the limits of her material in pieces that balance between lightness and gravity, structure and fluid form. Drawing on inspiration from nature, she creates large, amorphous abstractions – simultaneously organic and almost otherworldly – covered in lavish layers of glaze.
