Upcoming Exhibitions
28 February - 25 April 2026, PF 25, Cultural Projects, Dornach, Switzerland
15 October - 15 November 2026, Kunsthalle Kohta, Helsinki Finland
Villa Renata Basel 2024
Tumbeling Through Time
Solo Exhibition
Villa Renata
23 March – 28 April 2024
Curator: Angelika Li
From her last solo exhibition in 2021 entitled ‘Geology, Cooking Heart, Curiosity, and other stories’ in Basel, Swiss ceramic artist Dorothee Sauter progresses forward, responding to her observations of the world in ‘Tumbling through Time’ at Villa Renata in 2024. Scattering across a white plain in the Garage space, fourteen works made through Sauter’s experiments with her unique techniques test the limits of clay, minerals, porcelain, glazes, pigments. Each piece is individual, yet as a group they generate conversations and resonate with one another’s energy: an animated cycle of scenarios populated with uncanny characters and gestures carrying titles like: ‘Risky theory’ (2024), ‘Tumbling through time’ 1 to 3 (2023), ‘Vase 7’ (2022), ‘Food gatherer’(2022), and ‘Heartbeat’ (2022).
To Sauter, her sculptures are films for the mind’s eye: fragments of memory whether conscious or subconscious, moments in a lecture, images in the newspaper, something she has seen but cannot fully understand, stimulation by science and literature. Her goal is not only the finished sculptures and vessels, it is also her developing process: the peculiar poetry of becoming, the dance between intent and chance.
Images from the news are impactful sources for this exhibition. In a bird’s eye view image, Sauter saw a city that was bombed out 90%. Lives gone, homes and cities falling apart. Rubble, skeletal structures, memories remain. In a newspaper, Sauter saw a photo of two young boys walking in debris, wearing flimsy plastic flip-flops, carrying a large pipe-looking object on their shoulders. What is it they are actually carrying? Where are they heading? To build a water pipe for their grandmother, to prepare a shelter, or are they building a weapon?
How do we deal with absurdity as humans? To Sauter, nature is where she takes refuge and inspiration. Not only is nature a medium that interconnects her with other people in the world, simply walking in the forest, being in nature is a healing process on a personal level. Sauter’s curiosity in biology and microbiology leads her to wonder about what plants do. How do they build their networks, and how do they fight against adversity and heal after atrocities? What is the future of humanity?
Curator‘s notes by Angelika Li, Spring 2024
Image above: Instability – 2, 2021, fired clay, pigments, 37 x 15 x 15 cm, photo: Marco Schibig
photos: Julian Salinas
photos: Julian Salinas
PF 25 Basel 2021
Geology, Cooking Heart, Curious
and other stories
Solo Exhibition
PF 25
12 – 26 June 2021
Curator: Angelika Li
Dorothee Sauter’s solo exhibition “Geology, Cooking Heart, Curious and other stories” (Basel, 2021) offers an extraordinary landscape populated by ambiguous free life forms. One may wonder if the scene is terrestrial or underwater? A myriad of mind games. The enigmatic sculptures stand as a cluster with their own wills: breathing, yelling, grasping; mouths, eyes, ears; protuberances, limbs, phalli; outward, inward, gesturing an urgency of energy discharge, if not explosion. Our eyes drift along these tentacular movements which suggest a potent life force with immense resilience and willpower. The colours are unmanipulated raw pigments from different continents, disarming in their utmost honesty. Placed together they create an almost-palpable fluctuation in atmosphere and temperature. Are they vessels carrying distant ancestral memories, dwellings inhabited by organisms before time, rhizomes in evolution, symbols of fertility or a group of quasi-objects extending from Bruno Latour’s concept of a ‘parliament of things’? Sauter wittily muddles our sense of time, shifting prehistory and future.
Staying curious, Sauter’s technical interest is geared towards the properties and transformation of clay minerals, metal oxides and the vitreous state of rocks, with aspirations to bring together testimonies from completely different geological time periods into her work. To Sauter, her sculptures are films for the mind’s eye: fragments of memory whether conscious or subconscious, moments in a lecture, images in the newspaper, something she has seen but cannot fully understand, stimulation by science and literature. Her goal is not only the finished sculptures and vessels, it is also her developing process: the peculiar poetry of becoming, the dance between intent and chance.
Excerpt from the curatorial essay by Angelika Li
Image above: Cooking heart, 2021, fired clay, pigments, 40 x 15 x 11 cm (detail) photo: Marco Schibig
photos: Marco Schibig
photos: Nici Jost
Gallery
Selected Previous Work
"Physical spaces emerge that are oriented towards past and future movements.
During this process, top-heavy intellectual approaches strike me as uncanny, something like recurring ruins. The answers of the hands are self-guided."
