DANIEL DEWAR & GRÉGORY GICQUEL
The Bidet and the Jar

9.6.2023 – 14.1.2024
Macro – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

Through the use of traditional craft production techniques and materials, the British-French artist duo Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel explore potential forms of sculptural practice and their relationship to manual labour. Their work—which lies between representation and function, the ready-made and craftsmanship—engages with popular imagery and produces a symbolic and functional displacement of everyday objects.
The Bidet and the Jar is a response to the experimental nature of MACRO’s Rehearsal section, and sees the artists further their forays into creating ceramic artworks, all the while maintaining a level of uncertainty with respect to the outcome. The stoneware sculptures are produced by the artists themselves using a traditional wood-fired kiln fabricated in their studio, dimensioned for a large scale of production. The size of the kiln, their commitment to hand modelling the clay, and the technique of high-temperature wood firing afford Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel the opportunity to develop a ceramic practice rooted in repetition and open to accidents and chance events. In contrast to this empirical and “artisan” approach, the duo have chosen to appropriate and refabricate a repertoire of industrial ceramics, habitually mass-produced within a factory environment.
In a display consisting of four identical tables, the sculptures sit arranged by type and form, depicting bidets, jugs, vases, basins, and dishes. Some are simply adorned by surface glaze patina and firing effects, while some are decorated with toads, taps, shells, and fragments of human bodies. While created in series, each piece appears as an original, thus toying with the notion of the uniqueness of the artwork and questioning the logic of industrial production.
Pale green tablecloths over long tables evoke a dining room, a sanitary ware showroom, and a clinical setting; all environments where the exchange of liquids from inside and out of bodies and objects take place. The works, each coated with a green-to-brown glaze, therefore appear as wet vessels or as negative spaces that can be bathed, emptied, and filled by the trickle of a muddy stream or the clear flow of a bathroom tap.  

Heartfelt thanks to Celine Arnoudt, Ailsa Cavers, Léonie Chauchat, Tristan Dassonville, Janina Fritz, Benjamen Rouault, Stefan Tulepo 

Curator: Luca Lo Pinto
Curatorial Coordinator: Matteo Binci
Production Coordinator: Giulia Caruso
Production Assistant: Marco Lo Giudice 
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