Pot Shop Boyz
curated by Sofia Ohmer & Florian Waldvogel with a display by Kathrin Aste
FRI 19.06.26 19:00 OPENING and SUMMER PARTY Kunstraum Innsbruck
Pot Shop Boyz continues the „Begehbare Gedanken“(enterable thoughts) series of the Modern Collection of the Tyrolean State Museums with a thematic focus on artistic work with ceramics. At its core lies the malleable, the earthy, the enduring and at the same time fragile — in short: a medium that is as deeply rooted anthropologically as it is artistically charged.
The exhibition interweaves a wide range of ceramic techniques and material approaches, juxtaposes narrative and sculptural strategies, and forms a cross-collection tableau concerned with questions of body, function, craftsmanship, and representation. Since the 19th century, ceramic work has often been negotiated in the shadow of artistic “high forms.” It is regarded as functional, decorative, even domestic, and for precisely that reason serves as a projection surface for culturally deep-rooted stereotypes concerning gender, labor, and value.
Yet the objects assembled in this presentation consciously evade these attributions: they caricature the notion of ceramics as mere utilitarian objects and replace it with a critical self-reflection on the material, its symbolic significance, and the social evaluation of artisanal practice. The objects are not “pottery,” not “vessels” in the conventional sense, but comments made form, probing the relationship between material, shaping, and social expectation.
The exhibition demonstrates how ceramic processes function as resistant strategies: twisting, deformation, rupture, glazing, and firing — all of this becomes a semantic vocabulary that subverts convention. The works from two centuries collectively open up an experimental field in which ceramic practices oscillate between figuration and abstraction, surface and depth, historical function and contemporary production of meaning.
In their dialectical juxtaposition, the objects form an open system of references, a circulating archive that resists any authoritative understanding of material or medium. Ceramics here are not museologically preserved but contextually activated: they leave behind the niche of the decorative and claim space as a conceptual mode of expression with its own epistemic and sculptural value.
Pot Shop Boyz thus presents itself as a ceramic compendium: a “material study” of the Other, a palimpsest of references, quotations, imprints, and transformations. The exhibits follow a logic of intermateriality in which glaze meets idea, form meets critique, function meets irony. The exhibition is an open resonant space that does not illustratively depict the relationship between nature, culture, and body, but materially negotiates it.
The works by gelatin, Elmar Ottenthal, Michèle Pagel, Karl Pfeifle, Elisa Schober and Rosemarie Sternagl are being shown in Innsbruck for the first time and challenge our common notions of materiality as cultural coding. They refuse the distinction between “art” and “craft,” between “high” and “applied” form.
VERANSTALTUNGEN WÄHREND DER AUSSTELLUNGSZEIT
FÜHRUNG
26.06.26, 17:00
KURATOR:INNEN FÜHRUNG
MIT SOFIA OHMER & FLORIAN WALDVOGEL
MEHR ERFAHREN
FÜHRUNG
09.07.26, 17:00
KURATOR:INNEN FÜHRUNG
MIT SOFIA OHMER & FLORIAN WALDVOGEL
MEHR ERFAHREN
14.07.26
CLAY & APÉRO
STUDIO AMANO x KUNSTRAUM INNSBRUCK
MEHR ERFAHREN
30.07.26
CLAY & TEA
STUDIO AMANO x KUNSTRAUM INNSBRUCK
MEHR ERFAHREN
20.08.26
PETS & POTS
STUDIO AMANO x KUNSTRAUM INNSBRUCK
MEHR ERFAHREN
