ANNA / Stoneware / 50 cm /1981
SEALS / Stoneware / Installation / 70 cm / Norrvikens trädgårdar, Båstad, Sweden / 2003
WHITE PYRAMID / Stoneware, diabase / Norrvikens trädgårdar, Båstad, Sweden / 2003
PILLOWS / Stoneware / 70 cm / 2010
BLACK PILLOW / Diabase, granite / 80 × 80 cm / 2001
BLUE PILLOW / Stoneware / 40 × 40 cm / 2010
RED PILLOW / Stoneware / 90 × 90 cm
CUBES / Stoneware / each 43 × 43 cm
CECILIA / Stoneware / 50 cm /1979
HORSE / Stoneware / 60 cm / 1980
HORSE / Stoneware / each 60 cm /1980
WILD BOAR / Stoneware / 100 × 80 cm /1984
BULL / Stoneware / 105 cm / 1986
WILD BOAR / Stoneware / 22 cm
CAT / Stoneware / 36 cm /1977
CAT / Stoneware / 84 cm / 2008
KITTEN / Stoneware / 22 cm / 1981
KITTEN / Stoneware / 22 cm / 1981
JERSEY CATTLE / Stoneware / 80 × 60 cm
BLUE SPHERES / Stoneware / Installation / Chicago Botanical Garden / Chicago, Illinois, USA /1994
BOAT / Diabase, granite /120 ×180 cm /1992
SHIELD / Stoneware / 115 × 55 cm
EYE STONE / Stoneware / 54 × 37 cm
KILN FROM KRAITZ EXHIBITION AT THE MUSEUM OF FAR EASTERN ANTIQUITIES / Stockholm, Sweden / 1974
ON THE SOFT SENSUAL FORM
by Lennart RudströmThe beautiful Venus by Botticelli sailed in on a seashell and disembarked in all her splendour in 1485. Twentysix thousand years earlier, another artist, this time anonymous, created the famous Venus of Willendorf, a fertility symbol that presented woman in all her exuberance, expressing lust in all her curves.
The soft form has been a fundamental symbol throughout the ages and has to a great extent followed art history, often independent of the material used, be that stone, wood, textile or clay. Art in our time is no exception. Ulla and Gustav Kraitz work with soft clay, but then they immortalize it through fire and glaze to forms that remind one of soft, beach-smoothed stones and of the iridescent luster of seashells. In their sculptures, there are no rough edges, nothing that suggests angularity or stiffness; they breathe sensualism. The glaze in celadon or oxblood approaches the sensuality of smooth skin.
Ocean water, in which all life on Earth began.
We have had many conversations about the softness and the hardness in sculptural forms, the plasticity of clay and how fire and glaze comprise the final phase. We have talked at length about the beginning – the embryo growing into life in all its forms, Venus emerging from the ocean, the act of making love, the child, the struggle for life, with some making it, others not.
An idea: about softness and hardness over the course of a long life. We have talked about what happened afterwards – which soft and hard things followed us through our lives. One can certainly imagine the soft pillow as the symbol which, under fortunate circumstances, follows us through our lives. The first pillow we experience is our mother’s soft breast. The associations flow, as do the swift impressions. Gustav Kraitz rises from his rest on the black heap of coal – the coal he uses for the final burning to achieve the shimmering glazes of celadon and oxblood here on Hallandsåsen. On and off, he lies down on his heap of coal. This is his rest during a workday. A resting place among unfinished diamonds.
Five years in Russian coalmines as a prisoner have taught him to seek unusual places for resting. As an artist and sculptor, he was considered subversive in Hungary. After the German occupation with its extinction of Jews and Romani people, the Russian troops arrived. Gustav was arrested the day after the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg and was taken as a prisoner to the coal mines. He was one of the few who survived the five years and, in 1956, he disembarked on the Swedish coast as a refugee.
This is where a new life started together with Ulla Kraitz.
Ulla was a painter but through Gustav’s work with sculpting, she started to increasingly experiment with this other medium. The stoneware with all its soft forms and its iridescent glaze expressed something entirely new. Ulla and Gustav have used their works in the service of peace and hope, as typified by their tribute to Raoul Wallenberg outside the UN building in New York – a blue sphere in luminous glaze sits atop one of the four diabase pillars, all resting on a foundation of paving stones from the Budapest Ghetto. On the stones, stands Wallenberg’s attaché case, cast in bronze. Likewise, in Stockholm, outside the Foreign Ministry, there is a sofa made of diabase – softly cut.
The attaché case is there, too. The wanderer can take a seat and put his hand on the case for a moment of stillness. Almost all of Ulla Kraitz’s work as a painter was about vegetation – the form world of the bean and the embryo. It reflected her experience of love and her fascination for scientific creation. Because her work with Gustav increasingly focused on sculpture, she began to transfer her images of the embryo and of pregnant women to stoneware and celadon glaze. This is where the tactile experience starts – far away from the strict and angular world. The artists and I talk about softness
– the soft pillow as the symbol of so much: of security for the child, of making love, of fear and fever sweat. Then, there is the pillow of play, with flying feathers, the pillow case stuffed with straw or litter, the pillow of clay or grass for the fallen. Or the soft pillow which, in the best of cases, will offer the last headrest.
So many fissures emerge during a lifetime – deep cracks and wounds. A child dies. The comfort we need is infinite. We hang on to the soft things in life. Both mentally and in reality. A story in the history of the Bible translation of 1917: But Jacob made his way from Beer-Seba to Haran. And he arrived at the holy place and spent the night there, since the sun had set; and he took one of the stones there to use it as a pillow and lay down to sleep. Then he had a dream...
“He saw a ladder raised on earth, with its upper end reaching all the way up to heaven, and God’s angels were stepping up and down on it...”
“And early in the morning Jacob rose and took the stone that had been his pillow, raised it to a statue and poured oil over it...”
What was Jacob’s pillow like? Was it angular, sharp or smoothed round by the desert sand? There is nothing written about that. But he had a dream on it.
To convey softness in hardness is a chimaera, a feat of the imagination. To immortalize the feeling of softness and sensuality in painting, stone or stoneware requires great skill and ingenuity. Sculptors like Jean Arp, who created the aluminium cloud bowl, and Henry Moore who sculpted soft simplified bodies in granite and marble are just two modernists among many who rose to the task.
For their work, Ulla and Gustav Kraitz have chosen stoneware whose natural beginning is clay. The bean – the beginning of all vegetation. In Ulla’s paintings, the bean is often buried in the earth – two germ layers signal life.
Viewing the sculpture “The Twins” in celadon glaze by Ulla Kraitz:
Big as my thumb. Small as my thumb.
The mild blue-green flat surface of the celadon glaze. I put you in my palm.
Observe your petrified blood circulation.
Cosmic blood circulation, one might say.
The Song dynasty potter smiling surreptitiously in his heaven. And with recognition at his unknown disciples.
He knows when the oxygen supply has to be cut.
He knows when to rake the embers.
He knows the exact temperature and time of burning. He knows the cosmic movements.
Where did these twins come from?
Were they born from the stellar constellation?
Was there someone who called them?
Silenced as in the presence of something inexplicable – a voyage in time and space – they keep their hands in front of their mouths in their astonishment. Our attempts to recreate nature – the seashell, the stone rolled by the waves at the water’s edge for thousands of years. Or with chisel and buffing material – or just creating softness on the plane surface with a paint brush and colour.
The odalisques: the Oriental or the Western ones, such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino, or those by Ingres and Delacroix – they all rest peacefully on their soft pillows. Or in contrast – Edward Munch’s The Sick Child sitting in her bed with a big soft pillow as support for her back.
The meadow in early summer bloom. One bends down to lie on the fragrant grass, with one’s arms and hands as a pillow, or maybe resting in the arms of another. One’s thoughts calm down, or wander both forwards and backwards – or just come to a halt for a moment of sensual pleasure.
The memory of a pillow that could be filled with straw, with horsehair, or a pleasura- ble pillow filled with the finest eider-down. The memory of the pillow from one’s childhood years: eider-down pillow-fights. The light eider-down sailing through the air like butterflies, filling the room with laughter and marvel. And silence and fear. There was nothing to save, everything flew away – nothing to capture. And what would the birds say – vanished a long time ago and forgotten? Everything turned white – just white!
ANNA / Stoneware / 50 cm /1981
SEALS / Stoneware / Installation / 70 cm / Norrvikens trädgårdar, Båstad, Sweden / 2003
WHITE PYRAMID / Stoneware, diabase / Norrvikens trädgårdar, Båstad, Sweden / 2003
PILLOWS / Stoneware / 70 cm / 2010
BLACK PILLOW / Diabase, granite / 80 × 80 cm / 2001
BLUE PILLOW / Stoneware / 40 × 40 cm / 2010
RED PILLOW / Stoneware / 90 × 90 cm
CUBES / Stoneware / each 43 × 43 cm
CECILIA / Stoneware / 50 cm /1979
HORSE / Stoneware / 60 cm / 1980
HORSE / Stoneware / each 60 cm /1980
WILD BOAR / Stoneware / 100 × 80 cm /1984
BULL / Stoneware / 105 cm / 1986
WILD BOAR / Stoneware / 22 cm
CAT / Stoneware / 36 cm /1977
CAT / Stoneware / 84 cm / 2008
KITTEN / Stoneware / 22 cm / 1981
KITTEN / Stoneware / 22 cm / 1981
JERSEY CATTLE / Stoneware / 80 × 60 cm
BLUE SPHERES / Stoneware / Installation / Chicago Botanical Garden / Chicago, Illinois, USA /1994
BOAT / Diabase, granite /120 ×180 cm /1992
SHIELD / Stoneware / 115 × 55 cm
EYE STONE / Stoneware / 54 × 37 cm
KILN FROM KRAITZ EXHIBITION AT THE MUSEUM OF FAR EASTERN ANTIQUITIES / Stockholm, Sweden / 1974
ON THE SOFT SENSUAL FORM
by Lennart RudströmThe beautiful Venus by Botticelli sailed in on a seashell and disembarked in all her splendour in 1485. Twentysix thousand years earlier, another artist, this time anony- mous, created the famous Venus of Willendorf, a fertility symbol that presented woman in all her exuberance, expressing lust in all her curves.
The soft form has been a fundamental symbol throughout the ages and has to a great extent followed art history, often independent of the material used, be that stone, wood, textile or clay. Art in our time is no exception. Ulla and Gustav Kraitz work with soft clay, but then they immortalize it through fire and glaze to forms that remind one of soft, beach-smoothed stones and of the iridescent luster of seashells. In their sculptures, there are no rough edges, nothing that suggests angularity or stiffness; they breathe sensualism. The glaze in celadon or oxblood approaches the sensuality of smooth skin.
Ocean water, in which all life on Earth began.
We have had many conversations about the softness and the hardness in sculptural forms, the plasticity of clay and how fire and glaze comprise the final phase. We have talked at length about the beginning – the embryo growing into life in all its forms, Venus emerging from the ocean, the act of making love, the child, the struggle for life, with some making it, others not.
An idea: about softness and hardness over the course of a long life. We have talked about what happened afterwards – which soft and hard things followed us through our lives. One can certainly imagine the soft pillow as the symbol which, under fortunate circumstances, follows us through our lives. The first pillow we experience is our mother’s soft breast. The associations flow, as do the swift impressions. Gustav Kraitz rises from his rest on the black heap of coal – the coal he uses for the final burning to achieve the shimmering glazes of celadon and oxblood here on Hallandsåsen. On and off, he lies down on his heap of coal. This is his rest during a workday. A resting place among unfinished diamonds.
Five years in Russian coalmines as a prisoner have taught him to seek unusual places for resting. As an artist and sculptor, he was considered subversive in Hungary. After the German occupation with its extinction of Jews and Romani people, the Russian troops arrived. Gustav was arrested the day after the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg and was taken as a prisoner to the coal mines. He was one of the few who survived the five years and, in 1956, he disembarked on the Swedish coast as a refugee.
This is where a new life started together with Ulla Kraitz.
Ulla was a painter but through Gustav’s work with sculpting, she started to increasingly experiment with this other medium. The stoneware with all its soft forms and its iridescent glaze expressed something entirely new. Ulla and Gustav have used their works in the service of peace and hope, as typified by their tribute to Raoul Wallenberg outside the UN building in New York – a blue sphere in luminous glaze sits atop one of the four diabase pillars, all resting on a foundation of paving stones from the Budapest Ghetto. On the stones, stands Wallenberg’s attaché case, cast in bronze. Likewise, in Stockholm, outside the Foreign Ministry, there is a sofa made of diabase – softly cut.
The attaché case is there, too. The wanderer can take a seat and put his hand on the case for a moment of stillness. Almost all of Ulla Kraitz’s work as a painter was about vegetation – the form world of the bean and the embryo. It reflected her experience of love and her fascination for scientific creation. Because her work with Gustav increas- ingly focused on sculpture, she began to transfer her images of the embryo and of pregnant women to stoneware and celadon glaze. This is where the tactile experience starts – far away from the strict and angular world. The artists and I talk about softness
– the soft pillow as the symbol of so much: of security for the child, of making love, of fear and fever sweat. Then, there is the pillow of play, with flying feathers, the pillow case stuffed with straw or litter, the pillow of clay or grass for the fallen. Or the soft pillow which, in the best of cases, will offer the last headrest.
So many fissures emerge during a lifetime – deep cracks and wounds. A child dies. The comfort we need is infinite. We hang on to the soft things in life. Both mentally and in reality.
A story in the history of the Bible translation of 1917: But Jacob made his way from Beer-Seba to Haran. And he arrived at the holy place and spent the night there, since the sun had set; and he took one of the stones there to use it as a pillow and lay down to sleep. Then he had a dream...
“He saw a ladder raised on earth, with its upper end reaching all the way up to heaven, and God’s angels were stepping up and down on it...”
“And early in the morning Jacob rose and took the stone that had been his pillow, raised it to a statue and poured oil over it...”
What was Jacob’s pillow like? Was it angular, sharp or smoothed round by the desert sand? There is nothing written about that. But he had a dream on it.
To convey softness in hardness is a chimaera, a feat of the imagination. To immortalize the feeling of softness and sensuality in painting, stone or stoneware requires great skill and ingenuity. Sculptors like Jean Arp, who created the aluminium cloud bowl, and Henry Moore who sculpted soft simplified bodies in granite and marble are just two modernists among many who rose to the task.
For their work, Ulla and Gustav Kraitz have chosen stoneware whose natural beginning is clay. The bean – the beginning of all vegetation. In Ulla’s paintings, the bean is often buried in the earth – two germ layers signal life.
Viewing the sculpture “The Twins” in celadon glaze by Ulla Kraitz:
Big as my thumb. Small as my thumb.
The mild blue-green flat surface of the celadon glaze. I put you in my palm.
Observe your petrified blood circulation.
Cosmic blood circulation, one might say.
The Song dynasty potter smiling surreptitiously in his heaven. And with recognition at his unknown disciples.
He knows when the oxygen supply has to be cut.
He knows when to rake the embers.
He knows the exact temperature and time of burning. He knows the cosmic movements.
Where did these twins come from?
Were they born from the stellar constellation?
Was there someone who called them?
Silenced as in the presence of something inexplicable – a voyage in time and space – they keep their hands in front of their mouths in their astonishment. Our attempts to recreate nature – the seashell, the stone rolled by the waves at the water’s edge for thousands of years. Or with chisel and buffing material – or just creating softness on the plane surface with a paint brush and colour.
The odalisques: the Oriental or the Western ones, such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino, or those by Ingres and Delacroix – they all rest peacefully on their soft pillows. Or in contrast – Edward Munch’s The Sick Child sitting in her bed with a big soft pillow as support for her back.
The meadow in early summer bloom. One bends down to lie on the fragrant grass, with one’s arms and hands as a pillow, or maybe resting in the arms of another. One’s thoughts calm down, or wander both forwards and backwards – or just come to a halt for a moment of sensual pleasure.
The memory of a pillow that could be filled with straw, with horsehair, or a pleasura- ble pillow filled with the finest eider-down. The memory of the pillow from one’s child- hood years: eider-down pillow-fights. The light eider-down sailing through the air like butterflies, filling the room with laughter and marvel. And silence and fear. There was nothing to save, everything flew away – nothing to capture. And what would the birds say – vanished a long time ago and forgotten? Everything turned white – just white!