Clémence van Lunen is passionate about technique and the possibilities offered by the material, which she successfully pushes to the limits of balance. The artist engages in a real choreography with the medium, leaving hand or arm prints on the rough or enamelled surfaces of the work, like the remains of a performance.
Transgressing the traditional forms of sculpture, Van Lunen handles her clay with dexterity and technical savoir-faire. As with each of her new series, these compositions defy all academic proportions, thanks to the many areas of raw clay left exposed in the firing process.
Ever since her earliest works, the artist has had a passion for the so-called popular arts, and these old-fashioned, anodyne or functional forms have inspired her to seek out and sublimate that which escapes tradition by enhancing it. In this new series, she succeeds in magnifying the movement of a kingfisher that flies out of a flowerpot or lands on it, or the simple fall of a curtain that opens and closes. She uses sculpture to highlight these gestures, these actions, these everyday objects.

Although form precedes subject in his work, the artist never separates form from texture. One draws the other, and the other can be seen before the first. For Clémence van Lunen, it’s not a question of simply representing reality, but of transcending it.
In this latest part of the Curtains series, and her presentation of the first Kingfishers, Van Lunen continues to reveal the intense pleasure she takes in modelling these voluptuous, exuberant forms.  While retaining her playfulness, but also her freedom as an artist, she brings out subjects and forms where we, as viewers, least expect them.

Clémence Van Lunen’s glazes are also applied with great freedom, contrasting and twirling on and around the ceramics, avoiding correct tones and avoiding the decorative.  But what might seem casual is, in fact, just a great ability to see and understand how a work of art is going to be built up, a work that will continue to change as we look at it. You have to admire the kingfishers, flying through the curtains, emerging from the flowerpots, seeming to give us a mischievous look at the incongruity of their presence in these plantations. You have to look at the multitude of details in the pleats, underwires, cords and stripes to understand and appreciate the enjoyment of creating. Having worked with ceramics as a medium for 20 years, at a time when it was not yet considered a ‘noble’ art by young artists, Clémence van Lunen continues to expand the field of possibilities, much to our delight.

Her monograph, published in 2026 by Skira with texts by Ludovic Recchia, Harry Bellet, and Arie Hartog, establishes her as one of the best contemporary ceramic artists in Europe.

It is through sculpture that Clemence van Lunen comes to art, trained in the studio of Etienne Martin at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris, she made her first ceramics in 2004, a medium she will never leave, having become for her a material of formal investigation.

After the exhibition Chinese Landscape in 2010, which closed several journeys in China, Wicked Flowers, in 2013, about Bricks and Flowers in 2016, and her series on cactus, in 2019 Clémence van Lunen continues to develop a singular universe. Often referring to obsolete forms, (bouquets of flowers) or anodyne (vases) or utilitarian , Clémence van Lunen seeks rather what « escapes » the tradition, and and it is perhaps by this escape, often incongruous and insolent that each one can apprehend her work.  Her latest series presented here under the title …all about curtains is inspired by the object of the the curtain, the utilitarian object, that we forget but which in addition to its many functions, impassioned the artist, by its movements, its curves, its flights, its arabesques.

The energy which emerges from these escapes of fabrics, of which Clémence succeeds as by magic to fix the initial trace, obliges us to see how the artist makes the light circulate on the sculptures, and to discover how these colors can at any time change tone according to the light. The technical complexity of these works and the self-derision that the artist develops with humility and intelligence, for each of her series, make her one of the major artists of contemporary ceramics

A catalogue is published at the occasion of the exhibition

74 colour pages – text by Harry Bellet

In the series Succulentes Clémence van Lunen shows the immense pleasure she takes in modelling these voluptuous, exuberant forms, and the power of irony with which she continues to create, it is probably not without reason that Clémence van Lunen is first and foremost a Belgian artist.

Using materials found in the streets of Chengdu (capital of the province of Sichuan) or in Paris, she features in this new series called « Fountain » the industrial ceramic matter as abstract stems. Those lines of bowls represent for the artist a way to respond with a exhilarating wink to Marcel Duchamp’s under-estimated sens of humour.

In 2014, Clemence van Lunen presented the series « Hy Barry » which was already an hommage conversation with the artist Barry Flanagan. This new series « Fountain » (the name given by Marcel Duchamp to his upside down ceramic urinal in 1917) is also a conversation with ceramic history

In this new series, bricks and bowls discuss and merge together under the energetic hands of the artist, as if she wanted to build a baroque piece.

If Clémence van Lunen short circuits the different kinds of materials in sculpture history, she also tends to perpetually question her previous pieces by kneading them like a « troubled kid » (as she pleases to say) to to give them a second life in a different shape.

This kneading creates a brand new radicallity. The result is like a schematization between previous and news shapes : butterflies, flowers and vases newly shaped as bowls. Clémence van Lunen succeeds in keeping the identity of the bricks, while pushing the spectator to question himself on the reality of the kneading.

We also recognize in these new shapes some references to the Art Nouveau (which was itself inspired by Egyptian art) and to monumental sculpture. But, by playing with the holes in the hollow bricks, Clémence van Lunen empties the pieces of their statuary origins that she both mocks and claims at the same time, in a back and forth mouvement between the origins, the history and the contemporaneity of ceramic. As Frédéric Bodet wrote in the catalogue of the artist’s exhibition at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec: « she tends towards  an art of vitality ».
And if a suspicion of irreverence crosses our minds, Clémence van Lunen responds with her work that she continuously nourishes with questions, without giving answers.